The Crash of the Shallots Profaned
In this newsletter: Another letter from Massapequa, some healthcare news, and a few words of advice.
Part I: At Home With Mr. Rapaport
What follows is another letter from the mysterious P.D. Rapaport, who over the past year has sent me an irregular correspondence regarding ghosts and the search for a missing barber. This letter is the second in a batch of three I received earlier this the winter, all postmarked from Massapequa, New York.
In his previous letter, Mr. Rapaport described meeting the ghost of a woman named Francis Andriozzi, who died of wood alcohol poisoning in 1944, and the ghost of a man named Edmund, about whom Mr. Rapaport can tell us little. There are more ghosts in this letter. I don’t know what to make of them, or Mr. Rapaport. I leave it to you to interpret, or to discard. (You can read all of Mr. Rapaport’s previous letters at this link.)
This letter takes up where the last one left off. P.D. Rapaport is continuing his search for Baum, the barber, who disappeared with tens of thousands of dollars he had taken to bet at the horse track from the patrons and employees of the shop where he cut hair, poorly.
In order to find Baum, Mr. Rapaport had decided to seek out the ghost who he believed must have been tipping Baum off as to the outcome of future contests at the Aqueduct racetrack. At the end of the last letter, Mr. Rapaport was returning to his apartment, which had been ransacked the night before by Cyrus and the giant, two goons sent by a builder of model ships named the Captain.
(I’ll offer the usual disclaimer here: This is a goof. There are no letters.)
Mr. Nathan-Kazis,
The landlady let loose as soon the tip of my nose cleared the doorway of my apartment. She had been pacing my living room, prodding with her slippers the rubble that, before Cyrus and the giant smashed it, had been my remote control, my computer keyboard, my stack of relatively recent editions of The New Yorker and New York and The New York Review, my 1901 Morgan silver dollar, my 1917 Mercury dime, my AM/FM/shortwave radio, my couch cushions, my computer speakers, my electric tea kettle, my wool hat, my complete set of “The Wire” on DVD, my complete set of le Carré in paperback, my necessarily incomplete set of Simenon in translation.
The landlady, having stewed there in the ransacked apartment for hours, screaming periodically into the voicemail of the cell phone buried under a pile of jackets by the door, was ready to erupt by the time I arrived. I listened to her for a moment and then pushed past, locking myself in the bathroom and turning on the shower as she screamed and rattled the doorknob. I stood under the hot water, rinsing the sweat of a sleepless night and a panicked morning off my skin.
The toothbrush was in the toilet bowl, the toothpaste squeezed out all over the sink, the shaving cream emptied into the garbage can. I stood a moment in front of the mirror, rinsing out my mouth. The lump that Cyrus’s blackjack had left on my forehead had deflated and was turning colors. I spat, turned, and shoved my way out the bathroom door and into the bedroom, where I found jeans and a flannel button-down in the heap of clothes the goons had left beside my overturned bed.
The landlady had not stopped screaming. Her flower-print bathrobe, which she wore daily as a house dress, had come undone in her fury, revealing a full-body blue fleece sweat suit beneath. Mercutio, her bulldog, had followed her upstairs from her basement apartment, and was wheezing his way through the ruined rooms, sticking his useless, misshapen nose into the heaps of broken plates and silverware and cereal boxes. I found a banana on the floor and ate it on the way into the kitchen, dropping the peel on the dog’s waddling back.
The general thrust of the landlady’s honking complaint, interspersed with pauses as she gasped for air, was that the state of the apartment was my responsibility, most likely my doing, and, further, was symptomatic of the thoroughgoing flaws she had previously identified in my character, as demonstrated by incidents including, but not limited to: The time I put a too-greasy pizza box in the recycling bin; the time I walked too loudly down the stairs before 9 a.m. on a Tuesday; the time I brought my garbage outside after she had already bagged the rest of the building’s garbage; and the time I knocked on her door to deliver the rent check during the finale of “The Apprentice.”
I made no response, which neither slowed nor hastened the flow of invective. She had yelled at me before, over various infractions, but never so forcefully, or at such great length. I wondered how long she could keep it up: Her face was turning red, the brief gasps between phrases broken with a rattle. I poured a glass of water from the sink and traced the flecks of spittle that arced from her lips and landed on the bottom of the upturned table.
It was time to leave. I shoved past Mercutio, who was spinning in impotent circles as he tried to bite the banana peel off his back. There was a black jacket on the top of one of the piles near the door; I grabbed it and ran downstairs.
My bike was where I had left it, locked to a street sign just outside the building. Like Baum, I had an old Japanese-made road bike; a red Nishiki with SunTour components, rusty where the paint had chipped away. My red casino die had named the bike the Shallots Profaned. I had rolled a two, for the second shelf from the top on my bookcase, and then a three, for the third book in from the left: Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything.” I rolled for a page number, a column, a line, and a word: Shallots. And then I did it again, and I got, no joke, “The Communist Manifesto,” which I had not and still have not read, and then another word: Profaned. Shallots Profaned. I had written the name across the top tube in White Out, though most of the writing had since flaked off.
The Shallots Profaned had suffered a bit of neglect during the months in which I had spent my time on walks up and down and around the city, and I had led it out too many times to soak in the rain, but the tires were firm enough and the chain was greased, and as I rode off down the block, the bike felt sweet and swift. The landlady, meanwhile, had tromped down the stairs and was following me at speed, bathrobe flying, blue fleece sweatsuit exposed, slippers beating the sidewalk. This was a surprise: I had never seen the landlady stray farther than the paved front yard of the building, never seen her in street clothes, never run into her in the supermarket or the diner or the deli. I didn’t fully believe she could leave the building; I suppose I had imagined her as a vivified appendage of that old row house, consuming electricity and natural gas, excreting black bags of trash and clear bags of recycling.
She had left the yard now, though, and so I rode to escape her, rounding the corner and climbing the slope of Prospect Park South. I don’t know exactly how I ended up on the pavement. There was an old man weaving up the hill on a rusty beach cruiser in front of me, and I was fiddling with the shifters, which were these steel paddles that stuck out from the bike’s stem that you had to fully take your hand off the handlebar to adjust, and then I was on the ground, the Shallots Profaned on top of me, wheels spinning.
A bike crash is inconceivable until it happens. I had never thought about crashing before, and have never not thought about it since; the total loss of control, limbs flying, disordered, towards unyielding surfaces. It wasn’t such a bad crash. I didn’t hit my head or break my wrist. I didn’t impale my femur on the ragged tooth of a backhoe’s bucket. No car came along to smash my face back into my brain, no motorcycle to crush my pelvis. The Shallots Profaned was fine. Still, it hurt, and there was a warm wetness under my right hand and a burning around my knee.
I could not stay on the ground. I thought only of the charging landlady and her bulldog, and I cursed and pulled myself back into the Shallots Profaned’s saddle as the shamefaced old man apologized vaguely in my direction. I shook him off and pedaled, hyperventilating through clenched teeth, hands gripping like crab claws. I knew that if I stopped it would just be a moment before Mercutio latched his jaws into the back tire of the Shallots Profaned, and I would be stuck in the landlady’s eternity of recriminations and explanations and police and insurance adjusters and handymen, and then it would be Friday and I would not have found Baum’s oracle-ghost, or Baum himself, and Cyrus and the giant would come and I would have nothing for them, and who knew what horrors unimaginable would result.
It had turned into a warm afternoon, and the park’s grand entrance at the top of the hill was busy for a Wednesday, crowded with nannies and loafers and that mysterious species of adult man who has the liberty to put on Oakley sunglasses and full-body spandex at midday and ride a carbon fiber bicycle in circles.
I rolled slowly down the walking paths until the landlady and her hound seemed far enough away, and I collapsed at the base of a linden tree. There was blood on the handlebars of the Shallots Profaned, blood darkening the knees of my jeans, blood on my socks. I took off my right sneaker and emptied a thimble full from where it had pooled at the sole. Nothing hurt much. I found tissues in the pocket of the jacket and dabbed at myself. I didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time for shock or a bandage or Neosporin or a little lie-down. I had forty-eight hours to find the oracle-ghost, forty-eight hours until the goons came again. I wiped my bloody hand across the leg of my jeans and pulled the subway map out of Baum’s notebook.
Baum had marked perhaps twenty crosses on his map, but some were smudged and some overlapped and some had been half-erased, and so it was impossible to make a precise count. I had visited two of the indicated spots already, to meet the ghosts of Francis Andriozzi and Edmund. That left about eighteen crosses to visit; eighteen that could mark the spot where Baum had found his oracle-ghost; the ghost who had told him the future.
Baum appeared mostly to have hunted his ghosts in Manhattan. One he found on the Columbia campus, one just south of the 66th Street transverse in Central Park, one at the natural history museum. There were a handful up and down Broadway, and a cluster near Water Street in the Financial District. The other crosses were harder to parse. The subway map is a blunt instrument, and Baum had done little to sharpen it. There was a cross around where the map said “Upper West Side”; one in Riverside Park; and then a few out in Brooklyn and Queens, where the map was far less detailed: Crosses floating in the empty tan swaths with which the MTA illustrates Howard Beach, Woodside.
Rather than blunder around Queens’ vast expanses, I decided to bike to the bottom of Manhattan and work my way uptown. I wiped what blood I could from the Shallots Profaned and climbed back into the seat, limbs stiff as I rode down Flatbush. Moving my legs helped with the pain, though, and by the time I had crested the center point of the Brooklyn Bridge I felt almost normal again. I rolled fast down into Manhattan, screaming at the tourists who wandered into the bike lane.
It wasn’t until I was rolling down Fulton that I realized my mistake: The Water Street cluster surrounded Baum’s barbershop, the last place I wanted to be seen. Aron, the boss barber, would be there, and what if he saw me lurking? He had shaken a baseball bat in my face when I visited the previous morning, unaware of Baum’s disappearance. And then, as far as I could tell, he had turned around and put the Captain on my trail, which was the proximate cause of my current problems; the reason my apartment was a shambles, the reason my landlady was trying to throttle me, and the reason I was biking around Manhattan with a bloody knee and a mashed-up palm.
I wondered for a moment if I should leave the neighborhood; give up on the Water Street crosses and chase some other ghosts. But I had spent thirty minutes riding to the Financial District, and what if one of the ghosts Baum had found there was the oracle-ghost, the dead seer?
The shop was down a half-flight off Fulton, the barbers’ eyelines just a few inches off the pavement, such that commentary on legs and footwear made up a substantial portion of the conversation. I ducked my head and pedaled hard, and snuck a look as I passed by: There were the barbers’ pates, bobbing about in the lighted shop, and there was Aron, his tattooed arms pulling a Wahl across some unseen clients’ head.
I rode another block and chained up the Shallots Profaned outside the kosher luncheonette. There was no ghost at the intersection of Fulton and Cliff. I looked at the map again. It was impossible to tell exactly where in the neighborhood Baum had intended to indicate with his three jumbled crosses. Maybe one marked some other intersection on the eastern end of Fulton? Maybe he had met a ghost in some office on the eighteenth story of one of the gray glass towers on Water Street, or in an apartment above the McDonald’s, or in the back room of the garbagemen’s union headquarters around the corner? I tried to feel for that motive force Baum had written about in the notebook that guided him to the ghosts, but all I felt was the panic I’d pressed back down on Flushing Avenue rising again like bile.
I reached into my pocket for the red die and felt its edges, its corners, its sides, its pips. Maybe it could help. I squatted next to my bike, pretending to check the air in the tire, and rolled the die along the pavement. A one, I walk straight. A two, left. A three, right. A four, turn around. A five, wait. A six, flee.
The first roll was a one. I stood, walked, squatted, rolled. A three. Stand, turn, walk, squat, roll. A one. And then another one. I was moving down the street like a drunk, or maybe a frog; squatting, then, hopping up, then squatting again. Perhaps people stared; I have no idea. I was focused on the die, the path, and the ghost waiting for me somewhere ahead.
I had turned off Fulton and was heading down Gold Street, an alley wide enough to accommodate a carefully-driven pedicab. Gold Street on that stretch between Fulton and John is an anachronism, one of those streets that never found its place in the city of avenues and right angles. It smelled, in those days, of marijuana and garbage; its glory the red brick Excelsior Steam Power Company Building, a hundred-odd-year-old former power station with its name in metal under one of its repeating arches.
The ghost was standing in the middle of the alley, just past the Excelsior building. He had a round belly and a dirty apron. He glared and spat as I approached, and grunted when I asked his name. He told me how he died, though of course I don’t recall it now. I asked him about Baum, and about the future. “The future? What do I care about the future?” the ghost said. “I’m dead.”
He loped past me towards Fulton. I turned to follow, but when I looked, I only saw Aron and another barber, smoking cigarettes and muttering at the end of the alley. We saw each other at the same instant, and Aron dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his booted heel.
“You find him?” the barber asked.
I shook my head. “You better do it quick,” he said, and turned to go back to his clippers.
I hurried back to the Shallots Profaned and let the red die lead me from ghost to ghost. The other two down in the region of the old Fish Market were easy to find: One, a young girl, looked out over the water near Fulton Street. She said very little. Another, sitting in the atrium of the big glass skyscraper at the end of Maiden Lane, told me his name was Morris Berkowitz; I looked him up later, too. He was the president of a cafeteria workers union local who came home one evening in 1933, sat on his bed, and was blasted into nothingness. The bomb, which also incinerated four residents of three adjoining apartments, was thought to have been planted in retribution for the shooting, three days earlier, of a well-known labor racketeer named Red Horowitz, whose primary persuasive techniques had involved a walnut walking stick with a brass jackal’s head for a handle.
Certain restaurateurs had hired Red Horowitz to discourage what they saw as a troubling strain of militancy developing among the cafeteria workers. Red Horowitz had visited Morris Berkowitz at his union office for a chat; the experience put Morris Berkowitz in Williamsburg General Hospital for three days, and led him to hire a slugger of his own, the young gangster Beau Rivers. The argumentative powers of Red Horowitz’s jackal-headed walking stick turned out to be insufficient to stop the bullet that Beau Rivers shot at him from the driver’s seat of an idling DeSoto. Red Horowitz’s occipital lobe stopped the bullet instead.
Beau Rivers had foreseen a bloody response to death of the old racketeer, and so spent three weeks after the shooting at his sister’s house in Peekskill. Only after Red Horowitz’s death had been avenged on Morris Berkowitz did Beau Rivers come back and move in on Red Horowitz’s rackets.
It was the ghost of Morris Berkowitz who first mentioned Seymour Katz. “Seymour Katz,” he said, when I asked him about the future. “That kind of question, you go to Seymour Katz.”
He wouldn’t tell me anything else about Seymour Katz, or where to find him, so I left the atrium and rode the Shallots Profaned north to Central Park, where, on the banks of the pond near Belvedere Castle, I found the ghost of a police officer named Gus. Gus knew about Seymour Katz, too, but all he would say was that the future was Semyour Katz’s remit, and not the remit of dead cops who just wanted to be left alone to watch the ducks.
The reticence of both Gus and Morris Berkowitz was disappointing, but I was making progress. I had a name, at least, and even if Seymour Katz wasn’t nearby, maybe the next ghost on my list would tell me where to find him, or the one after that. At the natural history museum, the red die led me up past the Theodore Roosevelt statue, around the battling dinosaurs, down the stairs, and into the halls containing the stuffed pelts of exotic and less-exotic North American mammals. The ghost of Sally Thomas was sitting on the bench between the diorama of two furious bull moose and the diorama of bison grazing on an open plain.
The ghost of Sally Thomas had only one arm. A polar bear had eaten the other one, as I learned much later on a visit to the Microform Reading Room. She and a classmate from Sarah Lawrence had gone dancing one weekend with two second lieutenants from a base out in New Jersey, and late at night, as a gag, they had climbed the fence at the Central Park Zoo and gone to visit the bears. One of the young officers had tossed Sally’s umbrella into the the cage of a polar bear named General Greely, and when Sally Thomas had tried to grab the umbrella back, General Greely had bitten off her hand.
The rest of the arm had come off in the operating room early the next morning. Sally Thomas lived many more decades before dying of mesothelioma in 1997. Her ghost had never heard of Seymour Katz. She was annoyed by my questions, and so I left her sitting on the bench, facing neither the moose nor the bison, but the diorama of two brown bears at the end of the hall.
None of the next eight ghosts I found told me any more about Seymour Katz than Sally Thomas’s ghost had. I picked them off one at a time as I rode north: One in the alley behind the Ansonia where Robert Redford shoots a guy in “Three Days of the Condor,” one on a bench in Riverside Park near the boat basin, one by the coffee grinder at Fairway, and then in diners along Broadway, first at 77th, then at 91st, then at 100th. These were sullen ghosts, sitting alone at filthy tables covered with strewn pickles and spilled ketchup, their eyes rheumy, their hair thin. As the the sun dipped, burning, towards the Meadowlands, the ghosts grew more and decrepit. Their lower eyelids drooped below the curve of their eye sockets, so you could see the maxillary bone through a thin layer of pink. Their teeth fell out as they spoke, dropping like corn kernels from the mouth of a toddler.
These last ghosts were too far gone to answer questions. Some had been men and some had been women, and for some it was too late for me to tell. They each tried to tell me their death stories, I believe, though I remember none of them. By this time I was beyond hope, beyond despair. I had found ghosts, plenty of ghosts; and yet the ghost I needed, the seer-ghost, Baum’s oracle, was absent; a false rumor. I abandoned the Shallots Profaned at 104th, too tired and disoriented to ride without crashing again, and limped north up Broadway, my knee hurting for real now, the scrapes on my hand looking gangrenous.
At 2 a.m., delirious and in pain, I slipped through Columbia’s main gate, squatting to roll the red die, standing to walk, and then squatting to roll again. In a moment, I was at the base of the Low Library steps, and I looked up into the smiling face, the black eyes, of Seymour Katz.
Sincerely,
P.D. Rapaport
That is all. The third Massapequa letter will follow shortly.
Part II: Some Healthcare News
I went to a big healthcare conference the other week and wrote a bunch of articles about what I learned there, including: a story on how Novavax has an opportunity to undercut Moderna and Pfizer on price as the Covid-19 vaccines hit the commercial market, a story on how collapsing valuations are sending biotechs running into the arms of big pharma, a story on some new Covid-19 drugs and vaccines under development, and a story on how government price negotiations for high-priced drugs could push big pharma to diversify its product portfolios.
Also this week, Moderna’s RSV vaccine seems to work quite well, and the FDA unexpectedly declined to approve Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s drug.
Part III: Words of Advice
I had the A.I. program Midjourney draw a picture of the ghost that P.D. Rapaport claims he saw on Gold Street. It’s here. Spooky. Not sure what a “PASSH PARTER” is.
A 19th century print depicting Gold Street a few blocks down from where P.D. Rapaport saw the ghost.
That’s all I’ve got!