The Ghost's Story
In this newsletter: A ghost at the Navy Yard, healthcare news, and some words of advice.
Part I: The Navy Yard Ghost
I hadn’t heard from P.D. Rapaport since early in the summer, and his story of ghosts and barbers and miniature wooden ships had slipped from my mind. I had been working on an essay about labor wars among New York’s furriers, but it had sprawled a bit and I had become a bore about it. I went away to a cabin near a cold beach for a few days to clear my head.
Three envelopes waited for me when I got home. Each had been postmarked from Massapequa, New York, and over-enthusiastically masticated by the postal service’s sorting machines. Inside the envelopes were three successive letters from the mysterious and elusive Mr. Rapaport, written in longhand on letterhead from a Super 8 motel. The paper was crumpled, and smelled vaguely of fish and spent gunpowder.
The letters took up where the one I received in July left off. (I say this each time, and I’ll do it again right now: This is a goof, this is a bit of fun, this is imaginary, this is a serialized mystery story. There are no letters, there is no P.D. Rapaport.) As you may or may not recall, the story, told so far over the course of three letters (which you can read here in full) began, more or less, when Mr. Rapaport gave $600 to an inept barber named Baum to bet at the horse track.
Baum disappeared with Mr. Rapaport’s money, and with money belonging to a number of other patrons of the Fulton Street barber shop where Baum worked, including a menacing family history buff who called himself the Captain. The Captain sent two goons to kidnap Mr. Rapaport, on the theory that Mr. Rapaport might know where Baum was hiding, and what had happened to his $19,000. Mr. Rapaport did not know where Baum was hiding, and so the goons released him on a two-day furlough, during which time he was to track down the missing barber. Immediately upon his release, Mr. Rapaport encountered a ghost on an overgrown tennis court within the fenced-off backwoods of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The July letter ended there.
I have typed the letters up, correcting P.D. Rapaport’s inconsistent spelling and his erratic punctuation, and rewriting his sentences when they became unwieldy. This was more work than it sounds; an act of translation, more than transcription. The first of the three Massapequa letters is below. The other two will follow.
Mr. Nathan-Kazis,
The Navy Yard ghost was named Frances Andriozzi, and she was disappointed to meet me.
“I thought you were someone else,” she said. She wore heavy denim pants and a flannel work shirt, and could almost have been alive, except for the weird distortions that seemed to pass across her body, as though a sheet of plate glass were slowly flexing between us.
“Who?” I asked, but of course I already knew. Just like everyone else that week, Frances Andriozzi’s ghost wanted to see Baum: Baum the barber, Baum the horse player savant, Baum the ghost-whisperer.
“I’ll tell you how I died, if you want,” she said, slumping to the pavement and leaning back against the base of the street lamp, where a handful of dandelions had pushed through the asphalt. She plucked one and picked off its petals.
I said that I did want to hear about how she died, and so she told me. I don’t remember any of it.
Talking to a ghost is a thrill, at first: Unseen doors swinging open, a hot breeze blowing from space-time’s molten core, the scent of wonders and terrors and demons and beasts, the imagined and unimaginable.
And then you pass through door after door but you just keep finding more doors, and some are oak and some are steel, and some have carvings of many-headed tigers around the knob, but they’re all just doors, and you finally realize that the ghosts are not a clue, not a sign, not a glimpse. The ghosts are just ghosts, and that’s all.
It is, in my experience, impossible to remember the stories that the ghosts tell about how they died. You listen, and the minute they get done talking it’s gone; a chalkboard wiped with a damp rag. Maybe it’s like forgetting a dream: With no narrative, there’s nothing to grasp, and so it slips away.
A death story should have a narrative, though: Something happens, and then someone dies. Perhaps one’s own death is so incomprehensible, even after it’s happened, that it remains like a dream; impressions and images to which a dead thing can never apply coherence.
As I say, I can’t remember a single one of the ghost death stories I’ve heard, so I don’t know if they are coherent or not. Maybe the ghost death stories are well-told. Maybe forgetting them is just a matter of focus. Maybe the listener’s internal monologue is so overwhelmed and distracted by the experience of being in the presence of the dead that it can’t absorb whatever it is the ghost is saying.
Whatever the reason, the story Frances Andriozzi’s ghost told me that day about how Frances Andriozzi died is a yawning blank in my memory. I did look her up later, though, when it was all over. I found her in the Microform Reading Room at the central library off of Bryant Park, where you can read the full run of the original Brooklyn Daily Eagle. And so I can tell you that Frances Andriozzi was one of 14 people killed in the fall of 1944 by a batch of bootleg liquor sold from behind the counter of a candy store on Hobson Avenue, down by the Navy Yard.
When the police brought the woman who owned the candy store in on murder charges, she said she always bought her liquor from a guy out on Coney Island, a bootlegger named Abraham Lincoln Bianco, whose stuff was cheaper than the legal bottles that came with the government tax stamps on them. When police detectives went to Abraham Lincoln Bianco’s house on Neptune Avenue, they found a 500-gallon still in the garage out back, and a house populated by what seemed to the detectives to be scores of Biancos. Abraham Lincoln Bianco, however, was not among them, and the other Biancos swore they hadn’t seen him in a week. No one in the neighborhood had seen him, either.
It turned out that a Coney Island gangster called Beau Rivers had been leaning on Abraham Lincoln Bianco’s brother, William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco, to pay off certain sizable debts accrued at a regular craps game that met in a back room at one of the hotels along the water in Sheepshead Bay. Beau Rivers had intimated that a failure to repay those debts in a timely manner would result in the the beating and maiming not just of William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco, but also of various members of the extended Bianco family, including an older brother named George Washington Bianco, a 12-year-old sister named Betsy Ross Bianco, their father Dominic Bianco, who was 58 and suffered from constipation, and their mother Maria Bianco, who had been born in Sicily and whose age was a secret closely held by the baptismal record books of the old stone church in the hillside village she had left long before the first war.
Beau Rivers also threatened various other Bianco siblings and uncles and aunts and cousins who lived in the house on Neptune Avenue and in the general vicinity, both by name and by implication, including Alberto Bianco, Dominic Bianco’s younger brother, who was an engineer on the Parachute Jump, and Alberto Bianco’s son Johnny Bianco, president of the Abraham Lincoln High School debate club.
The threats worried William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco, who was 22 and, unlike his brother George Washington Bianco, who worked as a waiter at Childs, had no steady job. William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco’s extremely limited skills as a gambler were useless without any capital to bet with, and there was no one left on Coney Island willing to extend him even enough credit to buy a five-cent hot dog at Nathan’s. William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco worried that if he tried to burgle and then fence his way out of Beau Rivers’ debt, he might get caught and sent down to the big jail on Raymond Street, which would be an impediment to making his payments. He thought about clearing out altogether and joining the Army, which would have pleased his father, but William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco had worked hard over three years of war to avoid putting on a uniform, and Berlin sounded like a grim place to spend the winter.
He took his troubles to his brother Abraham Lincoln Bianco, who quickly grasped the severity of the threat to the health and wellbeing of the Bianco family. Abraham Lincoln Bianco’s bootlegging business did generate a reasonable cashflow, but William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco had lost a lot of money at that craps game, and the repayment schedule set by Beau Rivers couldn’t be met at Abraham Lincoln Bianco’s normal rate of production. To speed things up, Abraham Lincoln Bianco started cutting the liquor with wood alcohol, which went fine, and appreciably increased the volume of liquor he was able to produce.
So pleased was Abraham Lincoln Bianco with the results of his new process that he continued to cut his liquor with wood alcohol even after he had settled William Tecumseh Sherman Bianco’s accounts with Beau Rivers, and all continued to go fine, until one day Abraham Lincoln Bianco got the proportions wrong and killed fourteen people, including Frances Andriozzi, three other female riveters at the Navy Yard, two junior naval officers, and a rabbi from Prussia called Jacobson.
The police found Abraham Lincoln Bianco nine days later, floating face down in Jamaica Bay. His nose and three of his fingers were missing; whether that was the doing of the crabs or the person who had shot him once in the back of the head was uncertain. Police identified the body based on the tattoo of a smiling rattlesnake that ran from his shoulder to his elbow. They never found the killer. They don’t seem to have looked very hard.
Anyhow, that’s how Frances Andriozzi died, and maybe she told me some piece of that story that morning in the dark of the Navy Yard, or maybe not. Maybe Frances Andriozzi had no idea how she died. Maybe she dropped dead halfway up the side of some great battleship, rivet-gun in hand, and she figured a big steel bolt had fallen on her head, or the ordnance dump the next pier over had blown up, or the Japanese had slipped past the anti-aircraft batteries at Fort Tilden. If you die of wood alcohol poisoning, do you know it’s the wood alcohol that killed you, or is that knowledge preserved for the pathologist who cuts open your gut?
When she was done with her story, I asked the ghost the obvious questions: What happened after you died, and why are you here now, and what are you, and what else is there? Frances Andriozzi’s ghost sighed, and didn’t answer. Her breath smelled of liquor and licorice. “That’s what he asked, too,” she said.
Frances Andriozzi’s ghost had liked Baum. She told him how she had died, he listened, and he asked her questions that she couldn’t answer. Then he visited her again. Ghosts don’t often get repeat visitors, and Baum’s repeat visit moved the ghost of Frances Andriozzi. She hoped he would come back. Would he come back?
I made no promises, and tried to get her to tell me more. Something about death, about the state of being not-alive, about what she had seen and felt in the eighty years since the wood alcohol turned her blood into acid. She shook her head. “Tell me anything,” I said.
The ghost just sighed again. It was like talking to one of those chatbots you used to be able to message on AOL Instant Messenger. I don’t know if this is within your frame of reference, but in the early 2000s they had these rudimentary chat programs you could message and ask whatever you wanted: Where do squirrels go in the rain? Why did Ruby shoot Oswald? And they would respond with these tricks meant to look like conversation; something like, “I’m not sure about that. What do you think?” Asking the chatbots if they “remembered” something was meaningless. It was the same with Frances Andriozzi’s ghost. Memory was an irrelevant concept. She was an echo.
There was a pause, and then Frances Andriozzi’s ghost stood and walked off into the bushes and was gone, and I was alone in the dimness of that overgrown lawn, where beached naval officers once held garden parties. Back on Flushing Avenue, my head began to buzz and whirr like an angry MRI, and I squatted in the gutter and hyperventilated.
Something had gone wrong with my brain. I’d been out walking around all night, my house had been ransacked, and I had been hit on the head, kidnapped, threatened, driven blind through the city. And then I had hallucinated a half-hour conversation with a dead person. Maybe the Captain’s giant had put LSD in my coffee. Maybe my mind had broken. I had no wallet, no keys. I was two miles from home, and had two days until the Captain’s goons came for me again. I needed clarity. I needed a brain that could interface smoothly with the world, and was not conjuring up dead women in flannel shirts to deliver instantly-forgotten monologues under a street lamp. I breathed as deeply as I could. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Or in through the mouth and out through the nose? I couldn’t remember. I tried both, circling my breath this way and that.
Bikers slipped past, inches from the toes of my gray New Balance 990s, but no one stopped. Perhaps there was nothing so unusual about a man having a panic attack on that particular stretch of Flushing Avenue. Perhaps I looked mad enough that they worried that if they stopped, I might lunge and lock my teeth into their calves, and drag them down with me into the sewer.
I found the red casino die in the back left pocket of my pants. I rubbed it between my fingers, hoping it could settle me, and tossed it gently across the pavement. A three. What could that mean? One, two, three. The Captain, Cyrus, and the giant. The three Bukharian barbers who had stood behind Aron the previous morning as he menaced me with the black aluminum baseball bat. The three butchers in bloody white aprons who had burst from the blackness to tackle the refugee goat. One, two, three. It meant nothing.
I squatted there until my heartbeat slowed enough for me to trust myself to stand. I began to walk, still deafened and blinded by the receding static that clotted my ears and crowded my vision. I thought about escape. Cyrus and the goon were coming, were following me, would smash me and grab me again. It had to be a bus. A quaint, outdated method of escape; they never would expect it. Even if they followed me to Port Authority, I could lose them in the crowd. I’d go to the terminal and look up at the departures board and roll the red casino die and go wherever it told me to go. I could find a job in Ohio, or Delaware, or western Pennsylvania, couldn’t I? Odd jobs? Maybe join a lawn crew? What do you need to know to join a lawn crew? How do you start a mower? Do they have keys, like a car?
My mind was running along these sorts of lines when I passed under the expressway at Navy Street, and thought of the subway map I’d found tucked inside of Baum’s notebook, where Baum had indicated with a cross the spot where I found Frances Andriozzi’s ghost. I squatted again and took the map out. Baum had drawn another cross on the Manhattan Bridge, not far away. I pressed a finger against it, and then against the dozen others scattered across the map. Perhaps it was no hallucination. Perhaps Baum really had seen ghosts at all of those spots. If I was out of my mind, if I had manifested Frances Andriozzi in the corridors of my subconscious, wouldn’t the whole experience be a bit more florid? Wouldn’t I be seeing winged demons flapping over the Watchtower buildings, angels driving flatbeds down the BQE?
I decided to test myself. I would visit one more of Baum’s crosses. If I went and found nothing, then I was surely insane. And then what? If I was mad, could I still flee the city; still run to the Port Authority, and then whatever strip mall motel would shelter me? Perhaps not. To home, then, and to bed, or what remained of it. To wait for Cyrus and the giant, and to accept, on Baum’s behalf, whatever punishment would come.
And if I did find another ghost? Then life was eternal, and death was a fraud, and the world was a scrim, behind which awaited infinities upon infinities. Or so I imagined, squatting there under the overpass and wondering if, through the obscure workings of the red die, the esoteric investigations of the barber Baum, and the unfathomable whims of the Captain, I would end the day a sage, a guru, a prophet, the Admor P.D. Rapaport.
I turned to the map. The cross on the Manhattan Bridge was close to the Brooklyn side. It was a little after noon, and the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, when I arrived, was quiet except for one shoeless jogger, wheezing towards Manhattan. He passed, feet slapping the pavement, leaving behind an aroma of beer and french fries. At the first of the bridge’s globe-topped towers I looked down at a Circle Line ship passing underneath, a crowd of children on its top deck, seagulls diving at their ice creams.
I tried to keep the ghost-hunting instruction that Baum had written in the notebook titled GHOSTS in mind: To feel for that motive force he had described, and that I’d thought I had felt the night before. This time, though, I felt no pull. I just walked, and there it was. This ghost was dressed in a shiny suit with wide lapels and a fat red tie. He was bald, with red tufts of hair just above his ears and eyebrows a half-inch thick and a quarter-inch deep. He told me his name was Edmund, and he told me how he died. I do not remember what he said.
Edmund did not know what had happened after he died, or why he was there on the pedestrian walkway of the Manhattan Bridge. Baum had asked him the same things, he told me, and something more: Baum had asked him to predict things. Baum had asked him about the future.
Edmund tugged at his big tie and shook his head, his eyebrows fluttering like butterfly wings. “Nice kid,” the ghost said.
Then Edmund bowed and turned away, and in an instant he was quivering like the mast of a ship just past the horizon, and I was walking back towards Brooklyn, making new plans as the R train whizzed past my ear.
Baum had been asking the ghosts to tell him about the future. Francis Andriozzi didn’t know about the future. Neither did Edmund. But Baum must have found a ghost who did, which was how he had bet so unerringly at Aqueduct that spring, building up his little syndicate until he took his big swing; $600 from me, and $19,000 from the Captain, and who knew how much from the rest of us.
And perhaps something had gone wrong, or he had just won and run off with the windfall. The key was Baum’s oracle-ghost. That ghost would know where Baum was. Then I could find Baum, and when the Captain sent Cyrus and the giant to gather me on Friday, I could tell them where Baum was, and I wouldn’t have to suffer any punishment, or to run away to join a lawn crew. I could go back to the simple life I’d led, my will subsumed to the will of the red casino die, dwelling within that blissful nullification as long as I could. Until the summer, at least.
I had Baum’s map. I had two days. AlI needed was a clear head. And a shower, maybe. Some clean clothes. I hopped the turnstile at the York Street station and rode the F train back to my ruined apartment, where the landlady and her wheezing bulldog were waiting for me.
The first of P.D. Rapaport’s three Massapequa letters left off here. I will share the second one imminently.
Part II: Some Healthcare News
Here’s what’s going on in the healthcare sector: The FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s drug, there is a new Covid-19 variant to worry about, Pfizer told its employees it is pulling back on early-stage research into rare disease treatments, and Moderna made the first acquisition in its history.
I spoke about those stories and more on an edition of Barron’s Live this week, which you can listen to here.
Part III: Words of Advice
You haven’t listened to this song in two decades. You were in the back of a taxicab in like 1998 and it came on WPLJ or whatever, and you turned to the person next to you and were like, “Not this song again.” And you owned the album, of course, and you ripped it to your iMac, but it’s not on your iPhone anymore; Apple Music has a habit of culling things without asking, but in this case that was just fine. This is not a song you miss, or has any place whatsoever in this third decade of the 21st century. Anyway, I’m not saying you were wrong about any of that. All I’m saying is listen to this. Maybe it’s just this version; maybe it’s the absence of Liam; maybe it’s the presence of Stern? I do not know, I have no theories. All I know is that it is excellent.
Think about this: You’re walking across Manhattan at 79th Street, from river to tidal estuary. Which two avenues have big, wide medians running between the uptown and downtown lanes of traffic? Broadway and Park, right? Ever think about how that’s a little weird? The West Side gets its big median on its central commercial strip, while the East Side median is on its marquee residential strip. I, for one, had not ever in my life thought about how that was a little weird, until the other day when I borrowed Paul Goldberger’s 1979 architectural guidebook “New York: The City Observed,” which reports, shockingly, that the developers who built the Upper West Side planned for West End to be a commercial strip, and Broadway to be the “great residential boulevard”! The Broadway medians were a mirror to the Park Avenue medians; Broadway to be a Park-Avenue-By-The-Hudson; skinny little West End Avenue for commerce. This plan was overtaken, Goldberger writes, in the “rush of development” following the Ninth Avenue elevated railroad’s extension up Columbus Avenue around 1880, which must have pulled the neighborhood’s commercial activity eastward. Of course, today, with the subway line traveling up Broadway, any other version of the neighborhood is almost impossible to imagine. Still, think of it: An IRT stop at 79th and West End! Fairway on 74th and West End! Zabar’s and H&H (RIP) on 80th and West End! Big Nick’s (RIP) on 77th and West End! And the Calhoun School’s TV-shaped building on Broadway, presumably? Anyway. Eh.
That’s all I’ve got!