The Satanists In The New York Steam Tunnels
Lucifer versus the Unholy Nuggets. A magical tale of Halloween night like no other.
If it’s not the most incredible story I have told yet, it will be the most bizarre. I have been dying to tell this story for many years. I think I related it to my son a couple years back but this will otherwise be the first time I have written it down.
This is technically speaking an honest account of the most anti-social thing I have ever done. It’s the most malicious thing I have ever done. I need to confess and get it off my conscience once and for all.
The real crux of the story is when we took two garbage bags full of Chicken McNuggets™ and turned them into bioweapons to drop from the shadows onto the Satanic cultists, scarring them all for life with the worst cloying stench in all of human history. This was 1991, not too long before I left for Los Angeles. I had not yet met my future “bride” and Lenora Fulani had not announced her run for the Presidency.
… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
When you came across Freebricker books … which inevitably happens some times in New York City … you just hit the jackpot. I had it explained to me in Greenwich Village one night by a part time pimp / book seller named Ray. This guy Ray never stopped talking about his short brief affair with Angie Dickinson. He had dated her for a week or so. It gave him bragging rights the rest of his life. He could never stop calling Angie a “fine, fine woman.” This man was in his fifties and married to a white girl in her 20’s who looked like a Penthouse model. She was expecting his child.
Ray told me, “Wait until dark. Don’t put out those kinds of books during the daytime. When you do put them out, put them up front. Usually in less than half an hour, somebody will see them on the street and stop. They’ll be very eager and ask you where you got them. Don’t tell them. Act indifferent like they don’t mean anything to you. Shrug and mention you thought they might be worth some money. Tell them you didn’t bother to look inside of them. Figure $500 each book and let them talk you down. Always bid high and don’t seem too desperate to sell them. They’ll usually talk you down a little, pretend that deal sounds fair and then say you’ll sell them all for ‘X’ dollars and then bump it up for a package deal.”
Both Ray and I had discovered these books accidentally put out on the curb, likely after somebody had died and his family did not think to pull those kinds of books out of his belongings. It happened all the time in New York city and after a while you could just look at a random cardboard box sitting out for garbage night and guess there were some quality books in there. You cut the twine holding the top down, flip it open and quickly pick through the books to see if it was worth taking the whole box with you.
Ray showed me how it works a few nights later around 11:00 PM in Greenwich Village on a Saturday, not too far from the fountain. A nervous wiry man with spectacles in an expensive looking coat walked by the table, spotted the books and froze solid, trembling with excitement. The wiry guy looked up at Ray and I but we both feigned boredom and waited for him to speak first. After a couple moments of speaking, Ray had this guy buy a couple of these books off him for $1200 in only a few minutes after he laid eyes on them. The guy had begged him politely to put them under the table in a box while he crossed the street and went to the ATM machine to get some cash out.
I never spoke a word to him. The mysterious stranger dealt exclusively with Ray.
Ray explained after pocketing the money in his cash wallet beneath his shirt what I had just seen. He said “I’m pretty sure that these guys have policy that any member of the Temple who sees these books where they are not supposed to be, should buy them at any cost on the spot and he gets reimbursed by his local temple when he returns them,” smiling with pride at his profit, “So remember while bargaining they got plenty if you stay firm. Don’t be too greedy or they could try another approach to recover them, if you know what I mean,” winking and grimacing.
I didn’t know what he meant but I guessed there were a lot of things that Ray knew that I did not, so I took his word for it.
Ray asked me to watch the stand while he went to get a bottle of wine. He often finished Saturday nights with a bottle of wine the last half hour before midnight. He offered me a glass every time but I was such a strict teetotaler I always told him to get me a Coca-Cola and I would have a drink with him. Ray went off down the block where the liquor store was always open on the west side, excepting Sundays.
I was a younger man, a little less solid and sometimes I got a little nervous. Being on your own in Greenwich Village is normally no big deal on a Saturday night but you can get real weirdos. The street was largely empty both ways as foot traffic dissipated. I always felt lonely these nights knowing everybody was sorting into groups and sex and company and it always seemed I was on my own. It bothered me much more then than it did later in life.
I was kind of daydreaming and staring at the road watching trucks go by, fewer and fewer of them before midnight arrived.
I looked up and the nervous wiry man in the expensive winter coat was standing in front of the books once again. It caught me by surprise.
He smiled at me, looking a little crazy. Like he was trying to be friendly but worried his face might crack if he smiled too much.
“Did you want to speak with Ray? He’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” I asked, guessing at the only possible reason I could imagine him coming back for.
He smiled a little more, exposing teeth that looked like this guy had never been to a dentist in his life. He reached in his pocket (my heart thumped) and he pulled out a folded piece of paper.
He extended it to me. He said, “You look like an interesting person. I bet others don’t notice but I did right away.” He nodded to the paper I was holding. “Have a look. You can probably figure it out. I think we should see each other again and we’ll talk. I bet you’re a person with a lot of potential. You’re just not in good company. Why don’t you come and see me and you’ll see that right away. This is a little gathering we do purely for fun on the holidays. You may meet a friend. There is dinner at a private residence afterwards and usually on this evening there are a lot of young women around your age there. It’s just for fun and don’t be shocked if there are some people in costume. You are welcome to attend just as you are, no problems at all.”
The nervous, wiry man in his fifties (?) had my full attention now. I was sort of stunned he had returned and even more stunned it was to speak with me. As I was getting ready to have a closer look at the paper, Ray walked up with a brown paper bag.
I went to gesture to the guy who handed it to me but I realized he was already walking swiftly away. I had just assumed he was still going to speak to Ray about something but he hadn’t even been interested. Ray looked after him as he vanished around the corner.
Ray asked, “Was that the dude who bought those books?” … puzzled as to why he had come back. I nodded. “What was his business?” he inquired.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. He said something weird to me and handed me this paper.”
Ray looked the direction he had walked in. “That’s odd. It’s midnight, we’ll have a drink then pack up the box truck. You have a place to sleep tonight? You always welcome to sleep in the box truck.” Many years earlier I had slept in Ray’s hopelessly decaying box truck that he used to drive his books around in when it was parked in the garage of the place he stayed with his supermodel young wife.
Saturday nights I showed up to sell books with Ray as a kind of tradition. He had helped me out when I was first on the street and taught me a few things about locating and selling books. His original plan was for me to collect money from his streetwalkers at night - his rationale was that because I looked like such a boy scout the cops would never suspect me of anything. Ray had a stable of extremely good looking women that worked discretely at night in a very nice area beside Central Park. The girls were so classy that the police rarely realized why they were standing out there looking like they were waiting on a taxi. I had humored him on this score for years but never had any intention of doing it. Like most pimps, he was a clever study of human nature and he often told me that I looked like I didn’t belong out on the street. The truth is (sad though it may be) the man was a surrogate father figure and I liked him because he had shown me respect and treated me like I deserved respect. He usually paid me $50 for helping him on Saturday nights and I never told him that I often made $500 a day during the week. I’m not ashamed to say that whether he was a good or bad man … some would say bad … he was certainly kind to me and was my friend. He was almost certainly a better friend to me than the sorts of people you meet in corporate offices in the colossal monoliths that towered over our heads.
Ray could go from charming to lethal in zero seconds. I saw this fifty year old man just change his body attitude and scare street punks so badly they got hemorrhoids and took off running. It’s true what you hear about pimps. They have a kind of aura that they can hide but they bring it out and you see they are capable of being ruthless killers the next instant. Until Ray realized how honest I was in all things, he had suspected me of keeping money while he was gone some nights and if I had I can assure you I would have turned it over on the spot. When he realized I was a different sort of person, he never suspected me of anything again. He was very perceptive in seeing I just was not that kind of personality. He said to me one night “I am not sure what you want in life, but I don’t think it’s money. You might want a fine girlfriend and I can get you that if you are ready for it. I like you Cleve. It’s hard to find people you can trust out here.”
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