Story Timeline: September-October, 1975.
STORY:
To distort later investigations, every political homicide needs at least two or three plausible explanations and alibis for those involved.
Gary Banomena in his concluding remarks for ‘The Practical Economics And Business Model Methodology Of Organised Political Homicide’, withdrawn term paper, 1964.
Transcript-excerpt (privately executed) from Black Hand Incorporated personal confidential archives, categorised Strictly Classified at highest security designation, company president’s eyes only. Locations vary as indicated. First recording made 23:07–23:52 in review of appropriate referred events evening of 13.06.1975 and prior. Recording made by company president Gary Banomena privately. Site of initial recording is the original company headquarters building, Blackwell’s Island, New York City.
COMPANY PRESIDENT GARY BANOMENA (summarising): “…which is still problematic, to say the least. So we’re going to leave this one entirely off the record. In closing I’d say the scenario is, for me, essentially identical to that of Rashomon. But with Styrofoam.”
***
From Black Hand Incorporated company confidential archives, press cutting in Media Related To Operations (tangential) file. Item is excerpted from an arts and leisure review piece for the Manhattan Globe And Mail newspaper, New York City, special arts correspondent and senior editor Michael Tumesne writes (dated 10.06.1975):
‘Generally speaking, this dedicated grizzled hack sees himself very much as a “Shoeleather” journalist, one habitually out pounding the mean pavements rain or shine in search of a current story against the deadline and payday. The hard street and ugly gutter is where this reporter likes to find his stories.
That said, now and then I do see something from the arts world that genuinely captures the spirit of the future-shocked age we live through. All too frequently I don’t like it. Which tends to paradoxically grab and reel me in nearer despite myself with a kind of horrified voyeurism.
Zero Points Of Articulation is brought to you by increasingly famous sculptor and former mannequin-maker Gerd Gold. Now on Technicolor exhibit in newly opened permanent gallery space at the notorious communist and liberal bookstore Kerry’s Kuomintang down in Greenwich Village. Thermoplastic and Styrofoam and Polyvinyl Chloride and other exotic synthetic materials are the only ones you’ll see here.
Kerry’s Kuomintang is a radical bookstore and notoriously hard-left-wing intellectual hub I know well. It’s the go-to first stop for your wannabe revolutionary zealot. You can get both Pravda and Izvestia the Soviet state newspapers, that day’s issue (25 cents separately or 45 cents for both), but get to the store early because they sell out fast down there.
Now Crawford Kerry, likeably flamboyant and well-known proprietor of said subversive nest of intellectual insurrection, is hawking the iconoclast visual arts Zeitgeist too. And with an entertainingly provoking panache. Last year the place got a makeover, largely funded through Crawford himself and a coalition of New York’s left wing scene.
New gallery space, and this exhibition is its own debut, is smart and simple with modular partitions. A ramped one-way three sided balcony for smaller works and prints with a built-in lift makes for a cool multilevel balance. Movable lighting on tracks and rows of suspension hooks installed in the ceiling maximise display versatility. The joint is right up to the minute in advanced avant-garde presentation shtick.
Selling socialism and ideological Marxism is one thing. Kerry’s Kuomintang is practically next to the viper’s lair of Wall Street so it cain’t be too hard. But Gerd Gold was already selling out his catalogue before I got there.
Crawford himself told me more than half the objets d’art plastique to be seen were sold before hitting premiere hour. Inventive statues and mannequins like the best of which first made Gold’s name crowd the centre. Imaginative objects that otherwise defy easy description.
A fun show, whether you’re a True Believer of the Revolution or a capitalist pig slumming it or looking to bet on polypropylene futures…’
***
Notation and dialogue following excerpted from ad hoc personal review recording by company president immediately following ZPOA pre-show viewing by invitation (07.06.1975):
GB: “Note for personal record: formaldehyde’s too good for this mutant Gerd Gold, whoever or whatever he is…”
Went to Kerry’s Kuomintang on a whim one Saturday morning when we’d had a quiet week apart from one executive reassignment job, that staged ‘remorse suicide’ of a debt-ridden corporate chairman. Wasn’t expecting to meet Crawford either, I hadn’t seen him for years since founding Black Hand Incorporated. That was a big part of the reason I felt safe heading over there.
I thought it would be good to say hi first.
(From company president’s private recording, sounds of a bustling Kerry’s Kuomintang bookstore in audio background.)
GARY BANOMENA: “Hi, Crawford.”
CRAWFORD KERRY: “Gary, my dear God’s own original angry and aggrieved child intellectual! Something uncomfortably pertinent reminded me of you just the other day. You’re looking rather gaunt and determined and presumably in need of some light lefty reading material. Howabout Sergei Eisenstein’s gloriously tedious Film Form: Essays in Film Theory with all the quotes from Lenin to keep himself alive with Boffo Boss Stalin? I have a beautiful new illustrated reissue just in.”
GB: “I need the new copy of Michael Tumesne’s Necrobiz Trilogy. He just released an updated Volume III and I’m keen to read the new death industries chapters.”
CK: “Why so, pray?”
GB: “I was thinking of upgrading my current investment strategies.”
CK: “Snark, snark! Still fiendishly sardonic, my favourite infantoid. You’re in luck, my first consignment of them was delivered just this morning. Hardbacks all, the updated paperback version isn’t due out for a month yet. Still in the store room boxes, but we’ll go back there and dig one out. And if you decide to drop in this Sunday evening or before, I could get Michael himself to sign it. I’m sure he’d be enthralled to meet you. He’ll be here for the Gerd Gold premiere.”
GB: “I read about that. It sounds grotesque. Good to see you, Crawford.”
CK: “Likewise, my swarthy almost pretty boy. I’m hoping the show will be a positive phantasmagoria and provoke legal action. Monster movies are making an inglorious comeback, so monstrous grotesque art made by a real living monster should be a fertile gro-bag area.”
(Company president and Crawford Kerry pause and laugh.)
CK: “Enough of this mad awkward banter. We’re old fellow travellers in this desolate money-mad wilderness of Gotham. The book is on me, and I’ll show you Gerd’s hideous ductile multi-coloured nightmares in advance of the advance showing tomorrow night. The exhibit’s almost ready apart from a few details and late deliveries. Come along.”
***
And so I saw Zero Points Of Articulation practically before anyone else in New York. Reading Michael Tumesne’s typically avuncular but surprisingly approving newspaper review later in the week I was surprised how much it chimed in with my own first impression of Gerd Gold. Against my will I had to admit the guy was abrasively talented.
Somehow I couldn’t seem to quite avoid the insightful and intuitive and appallingly dangerous investigative journalist Michael Tumesne, no matter how I strategized that. He’d latched onto our operations and been shadow-tracking us for years. Gotten way too close to us in his inferences of how Black Hand Incorporated did its business.
Partly that was the reason I wanted Tumesne’s new updated Necrobiz Trilogy omnibus. Tumesne even devoted a chapter to us. Or rather possible firms like us, in a special long speculative chapter right at the end. He’d even cleverly deduced a list of likely cover business categories that included our own of private communications contracting.
Crawford got and generously gifted me a copy of the Necrobiz omnibus, just as he’d promised, and then we went out and around back to the service entrance I knew so well from my days working for him ten years previously. Then into the brilliantly lit big new gallery space, which seriously did impress me. Kerry’s Kuomintang really had changed in the last few years.
Ultramodern gallery Crawford showed me to was the perfect setting for a surprisingly numerous series of garishly coloured massive plastic monoliths set against the long curving walls. Cyclopean polychrome slabs with three-foot wide faces looming out of them at different angles like maniacal death masks. Demanded your attention the same way as an unpaid mid-town taxi fare.
These surrounded an even more numerous crowd of surreally variegated mannequins in the centre. Some were only vaguely blockily anthropoid, and seemed to wander around each other in a subtle and finely-judged placing. These were all solid figures as well, cleverly designed and weighted and balanced.
You followed an intricate pathway of artificial footprints through them. Somehow it adroitly threw you off-balance. Just like being in an actual living street mob.
(From company president’s private recording, occasional construction sounds of a gallery show setup.)
CK: “Positively hallucinatory, isn’t it, my dear? Take a look at the assorted famous faces round the circumference left to right. That’s old LBJ on the imperial purple one, Richard Nixon on the incandescent pink, Queen J Edgar on the chequered, Carl Gustav Jung on the mysterious black cinematic one, Gerald Ford on the prismatic spectrum and Andy Warhol on the boring grey. Now he really is plastic like he wanted. I particularly like that barbed touch. I myself am portrayed on the fluorescent cadmium yellow one. Very particularly, I do not like that iteration. Between you and me he’s visually accusing me of trying to poison him with some rather unusually powerful opium we once shared.”
GB: “Not that overpriced venom all those tennis shoe-smoking Beatniks flippantly call Rangoon Swoon, by any chance?”
CK (pause): “The child is full of surprises, as he always was back in the day. It was indeed that, and do tell?”
GB: “My company installed some phone security equipment for Warhol a few years ago in that zoo of his called The Factory. He invited us to a degenerate party there the same night. I saw what Laotian highlands-cultivated Papaver Somniferum Omni did to some of his more prominent cohorts. Trucker said you have to get it from Golden Triangle nation diplomats or some special super-creepy senior supercreep Triad outfit who have the sole non-governmental sales franchise.”
CK: “I was gifted some from a plenipotentiary of the King of Thailand. You walk in many interesting milieux, Gary.”
GB: “Don’t fool around with that stuff, Crawford. It’ll turn you into Doctor Strangelove. More spaced-out than Skylab. Extreme suggestibility is one of its effects. Trucker said Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Truman Capote all woke up thinking they were penguins.”
CK (chuckling): “Well, I was advised on careful use for novices and my experience was rather enjoyably fabulist. Gerd however seemed to…recoil from it. My benefactor had said something cryptic to the effect that the true character of the soul was the prism by which you would imaginate the Swoon’s visionary potential. I guess it all sounds pretty Out There.”
GB: “Jest telling you a freak-out will inescapably see more freaked-out things. From the look of this Gerd Gold’s stuff, he’s one hundred and ninety-nine percent certifiable.”
CK (laughing softly): “That mordant to-the-point humour of yours. Well, you’ve summed up Gerd all too accurately. And as you can see he’s not shy of applying that unflattering perspective to himself. This is his self-portrait monolith here.”
GB: “He’s done himself with little horns in sky blue with cloud patches. That sure draws the eye. He’s doing the exact opposite of applying the same unflattering treatment to himself, Crawford. Gold’s an obvious obsessive egomaniac. Not one of these other blocks has the same peeper-grab impact, and it’s intentional.”
CK: “If there was a Holy Inquisition operating today, you’d be perfect for them.”
GB: “Is this white one meant to be Medusa?”
CK: “With the face of Bette Davis from Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? I think Gerd was also going to put Joan Crawford on this one just below on a black bottom half which would have been optically stunning, but she threatened to sue. Mommie Dearest, like life, is a bitch; my sweet.”
***
Unsettled best describes how I left Greenwich Village later that afternoon, far longer a time than I’d anticipated. Crawford Kerry, the only other person who had showed kindness and care to me in New York apart from three trusted colleagues, nursed and unsuccessfully concealed with thick white cosmetic two very black eyes.
Walked a bit unsteadily, and to my practiced eye after years of professional brutality clearly had sustained a severe beating or assault recently. And from the few hints he seemingly reluctantly gave it was clear that the perpetrator was Gerd Gold.
***
(From company president’s private recording, sounds of gallery show held in Kerry’s Kuomintang bookstore in audio background, voice of Crawford Kerry giving a raconteur’s description of exhibits, 18:08-19:01, 11.07.1975. All four company officers present at location.)
SURVIND (‘TRUCKER’) JUGGERGHAZI, COMPANY DEPUTY PRESIDENT AND OFFICIAL ARCHIVIST: “Are you quite sure this is entirely prudent, Gary?”
GB: “Dirty laundry always makes the biggest splash, Trucker.”
(Both laugh as two sets of footsteps rapidly approach, faint commotion in audio background.)
WARKENTIN WESTGATE (VARIOUS COMPANY TITLES): “Guys, I think we should hop back into the bookstore part pronto and do a little intervention.”
DAG ULKÖLN (VARIOUS COMPANY TITLES): “As in riot control. Our notorious artist just came in, started making a lot of loaded remarks to the crowd at the free show-buffet and there’s a full-blown tantrum going on between him and some of his former boyfriends.”
GB: “Angry rich ugly lover-patrones, right?”
WW: “Right. It’s the exploding fruit salad inevitable in there.”
DU: “They’re chasing him through the aisles, and he’s leading them. Two display shelves gone crashing over already and more on the way.”
GB: “Hokay; let’s go pacify things. I hate those types who don’t respect a legitimate odeum.”
S(‘T’)J: “Typical culture-vulture New York. We’re just lucky Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer aren’t here tonight too…”
GB (humorously imitating the gruff voice of Norman Mailer): “Gore, I don’t like your tie. It’s too long. Like your sissy-boy novels…”
(Chuckling from all four company officers as they audibly rapidly run off towards increased sounds of commotion and falling objects, shouts now rising from bookstore area.)
***
(Same location, approximately half an hour later.)
CRAWFORD KERRY: “Thanks for all your help, my loves. That was quick thinking, using the fire extinguisher on those brawling yahoos. Even they couldn’t help laughing at themselves.”
WW: “Made sure to get those photographers first. They were following around snapping everything so I bulls-eyed them. Unloaded their cameras fast while they had the foam in their eyes and dropped ‘em back. I don’t think they even noticed in all the confusion.”
DU: “I checked and made sure there weren’t any other shutterbugs, like amateurs with Kodak Brownies or Leica’s or something. Nothing, so apart from the actual damage it’ll all be hearsay.”
GB: “Good work. Kee-rikey, does that Goldie-boy have one creative vocabulary. I could barely hold him, seriously wiry and wired at the same time. Swearing like Ladybird’s parrot, he was.”
WW: “That dude must have a copy of The Professional Profaner’s Thesaurus or something.”
S(‘T’)J: “Hah, hah. At least a pursuit turned on the pursuers defused the situation. They were too surprised to think or react. We made sure to funnel them into the cafeteria area so the book stock wouldn’t be further damaged.”
CK: “Yes, that was very…professional.”
DU: “Scenarios like that you improvise on the run, sir. We temporarily shored up those shelves they pushed over, but you’ll need to replace them.”
CK: “Gentlemen, I’m in your debt and in more ways than one. Howsoever might I reciprocate?”
GB: “Put on more boring exhibitions, Crawford. ‘History of Commie-Themed Samovars’, or ‘Triple-X-Classified Lonely Hearts Ads In Pravda’ or sumpin’.”
(Uproarious laughter)
***
I decided to give something back to Crawford. At least take some of this anguish he was subjecting himself to with Gerd Gold away. I owed him.
***
(Private recording resumes, 09:43-09:48, location Kerry’s Kuomintang bookstore, 12.07.1975)
CK (audibly surprised): “Four ampoules of Rangoon Swoon? How in the pink blazes did you acquire these little treasures, Gary? Do you have any idea how valuable these are?”
GB: “Thank Warhol. We still maintain and periodically upgrade the phones at his new place. I had his setup replaced for free as a courtesy three months ago and he gave me this when I went around to verify the work with one of my colleagues you met.”
CK: “Darling boy, I don’t know what to babble in thanks. You hardly know what you’re giving away.”
GB: “If you see Buddha, say a big Hi to the Fat Guy In The Sky for me. See you on Friday night.”
***
Trucker was against it. Our company pharmacy naturally had a stash of Papaver Somniferum Omni. We’d made sure to have some in stock ever since Survind discovered its existence at Warhol’s original Factory in the Decker building. The suggestibility I described was real and potent, but it was far too expensive to use regularly.
***
(From company president’s private recording, sounds of continuing gallery show ‘Zero Points Of Articulation’ held in Kerry’s Kuomintang bookstore in audio background, unknown voice listlessly giving a half-hearted description of exhibits, 20:38-20:51, 13.07.1975.)
SURVIND (‘TRUCKER’) JUGGERGHAZI: “Gary, I am worried about Crawford Kerry.”
GARY BANOMENA: “Me too, Trucker. He hasn’t shown up and neither has pretty bully-boy Goldie. Crawford gave me the word tonight was going to be some big capstone kind of publicity stunt to round off the show, but I can’t get a home phone answer from him. Normally he’d be here or there.”
S(‘T’)J: “No journalists have showed up tonight. They would have been told to make sure of maximum coverage. The young man in the gallery doing the exhibition commentary is a bookstore assistant filling in as best he can. Not very well, as you can hear. He told me himself none of the staff or night manager have heard from Kerry. No instructions have been issued to be ready for a surprise arrival or event, which would surely have been the case. It’s very atypical behaviour from a usually responsible boss.”
GB: “And they both have big stakes in a final night’s performance going well.”
S(‘T’)J: “As you might say Gary: ‘Zackly. This is lacklustre and uncharacteristic. Something is clearly wrong, but not just for Crawford Kerry.”
GB: “How so?”
S(‘T’)J: “With him. Your friend has not been quite straight with us. He described his black eyes and injuries to Warkentin and Dag as a combined street mugging and homophobic attack. I believe the term is ‘queer bashing’. For myself he said it had been some unspecified domestic accident in his apartment building and a fall downstairs. You said Gerd Gold confessed to it.”
GB: “Anyone would be embarrassed and evasive about something like that, Trucker.”
S(‘T’)J: “Agreed. Kerry gave too much detail and specifics. To me the stories sounded pre-rehearsed for our benefit. I think it’s deliberate. There is an important missing factor here I can’t quite envision.”
GB: “Maybe Gerd Gold is the missing factor and we should hit him up for some answers. So to speak.”
***
It was too easy. I got that same grim feeling as Trucker less than an hour later once we were inside Gerd Gold’s silent and darkened sanctum sanctorum, a converted warehouse down in Greenwich Village. Just as our specialist locksmith Warkentin almost effortlessly opened the doors I thought I heard the faint distant clank of an industrial door closing deeper inside, but couldn’t be sure.
Right in centre stage there stood an exhibition all on its own. Single glittering humanoid figure of natural proportions with its arms raised in some kind of ecstatic benediction or supplication. Petrified and silent and haunted as the motionless studio around it.
We found and hit the lights.
Got the message.
My God.
***
(Private recording resumes, 21:49-21:59, location Gerd Gold’s private studio, Mollitia Buildings, Baekeland Street, Greenwich Village, New York City, 13.07.1975)
WW: “Oh. My. God.”
S(‘T’)J: “Vishnu and Shiva and Nemesis and Juggernaut come to mind.”
DU: “My old-country mum would have invoked Balder and Freya and Odin for something like this.”
GB (long pause): “Crazy; man.”
***
Gerd Gold stood before us entombed in thermoplastic with an ultra-hard Styrofoam finish. It had dried so smoothly over his body he was indistinguishable from one of his own sculptures. He had put on weighted boots that went up past the knees, a brace normally used for mannequin treatment, and inundated by a clever mechanical pouring mechanism.
Hideously detailed plastic death-mask face was composed and practically beatific. Knew only one credible explanation for that.
***
(Private recording resumes, 13:26-13:44, location Kerry’s Kuomintang bookstore, 19.07.1975)
GB: “Hi, Crawford.”
CK: “Ah, Gary. I’ve been expecting you these several days past.”
GB: “How did you get Gold to take Rangoon Swoon again?”
CK: “I told him it was synthetic mescalin, a particular variety he had been keen to try. Convincing Gerd I was still in love with him despite everything wasn’t difficult. Sadistic narcissists are often like that.”
GB: “And once he was suggestible enough, you also told Gold to glaze himself alive.”
CK: “To be fair, it was his mad idea in the first place under the influence. I merely encouraged it.”
GB: “Crawford, I can understand you wanting revenge for what Gerd Gold did to you. But I didn’t give over that Rangoon Swoon as a manipulation and murder weapon.”
CK: “Didn’t you, old friend?”
GB: “Let’s just say there would be cheaper alternatives available if you wanted them.”
CK: “And I appreciate that more than you know. But it was a very personal matter and had to be handled that way.”
GB: “Outright poisoning and induced mesmerism is what it was, and I think you know that.”
CK: “Doubtless an ancient kind of vengeance. That’s what made it so bitterly satisfying and genuinely traumatic. I had to sacrifice a small part of myself to do and see it through. A private rather than a political kind of homicide; Gary.”
***
Every single nerve in me instantaneously goes hyperborean cold when he says that.
***
GB: “Don’t rightly know what you mean, Crawford.”
CK: “Of course you do. What you don’t know is that when you left my employ ten years ago, several of your photocopied epistles ‘The Practical Economics And Business Model Methodology Of Organised Political Homicide’ remained behind in the store. One afternoon Michael Tumesne came in and idly picked up and read through a copy as we talked about this and that and the other. I’d already known him for years previously and he regularly dropped in then as now.”
GB: “…?…”
CK: “You have a very practiced composure, my dear boy. I admire that kind of remarkable sang froid, it’s difficult to achieve convincingly. Don’t worry, Michael didn’t buy a copy. They never sold otherwise so I eventually took them off the shelf. But I think Mike vaguely recalled the work when he later started to suspect the existence of and investigate your organisation. You reminded him of it yourself in advance, you see.”
GB: “No one respects Michael Tumesne more than me. Look at the man’s investigative record, he’s a crusader. But to be honest with you Crawford, the man’s a raving lunatic about this privatised assassination bureau thing of his. Murder Incorporated is straight crime fiction fantasy stuff.”
CK: “A couple of years ago I was invited to a charity event promoting libertarian literature with some rather high-powered corporate sponsors. Afterwards I took some of the senior executives to the same private dining club I took you. They were astonished I could get us a table just by walking in and later opened up to me. Rather oddly the subject of occupational hazard came up. I mentioned fear of federal prosecution. Several of them mentioned corporate assassination without a trace of irony. Not politically or ideologically motivated. Their own colleagues conspiring to have them, I believe the vulgar term is ‘bumped off’ to avert scandal or put a rival out of the way. Purely as a business methodology.”
GB: “I doubt they used that word.”
CK: “No, indeed. I’m quoting from your paper, of course. They were describing exactly what that paper set out as a business plan. Your business plan. One of them quietly mentioned the name Black Hand Incorporated in a low voice. I had to strain to hear it. Two of the others immediately recognised the name and told him to be quiet in no uncertain terms. They changed the subject and wouldn’t mention it again.”
GB: “Sounds like a TV movie title. They must have seen a rerun of that one The Periphery from, I think it was 1970. Frank Gorshin and Angie Dickinson and Burgess Meredith. Surprisingly good, totally bonkers. Wasn’t Tumesne an advisor on that?”
CK: “He was, and also told me he kept his name off the credits. Deliberately, so as not to alert the real perpetrators he suspected and helped write into the teleplay. You must have noticed and done some quite thorough research on what’s an obscure and forgotten television pilot movie.”
GB: “Nothing more than paranoid conspiracy thriller crapola, Crawford. Jest another stupid Friday night movie entertainment genre for the crowd. It’s been going since The Manchurian Candidate. I’m waiting for The Three Stooges Join Parallax Corporation.”
CK (chuckling): “That quick wit and intelligence is the reason you’ve survived, Gary. Clearly you’re their leader. Harshly pragmatic and fearsomely proficient in a way I never anticipated you could make yourself. I admire that too.”
GB: “Nothing to admire about hit men. Whatever kind of take they put on it. They’re gangsters and mercenaries and lower life forms.”
CK: “And you still have that awe-inspiring conscience. I can’t imagine the reconciliations you must have to endure. How you all became professional assassins or why I don’t know. But I instinctively sensed you could bring me what I needed. My means to punish Gerd Gold.”
GB: “You surely did that. With my innocently meant purely medicinal gift. So what makes you better than him, Crawford?”
CK: “Nothing at all. I sincerely regret what I did. But he hurt me too much to forgive him.”
GB: “Well, I’m not going to report you. Guess that makes us even.”
(Rustling paper noise)
CK: “Thank you, my friend. And in return, here is the sole surviving copy of your highly original magnum opus and business plan in all its poorly mimeographed and badly stapled glory. Michael Tumesne need never know. He did remember later you see, and came here looking.”
GB: “I’m grateful.”
CK: “And along with the epistle you’ll find four permanent membership cards to the store giving each of you a 15% discount on all purchases. This will be our own rather peculiar kind of Détente.”
GB: “You’re a bloated capitalist hog at heart, Crawford.”
(Both laugh softly.)
***
And that was that. Black Hand Incorporated itself was left with a degree of risk-exposure that I’d never anticipated. Four ampoules of Rangoon Swoon opium and a little anonymous public intimidation visibility were nothing. Michael Tumesne was something else again.
He had read me. Read me. All those years ago, just about at the time I seriously decided to create Black Hand Incorporated on the basis of that half-jokester’s pamphlet.
So I reread the entire thing, again in solitude at Blackwell’s Island, the only place I felt really safe; thinking back to our first days.
***
From Black Hand Incorporated confidential archives, company history section, excerpted from Chapter Nine: ‘Managing the Aftermath’, 1964 end of term graduate paper (withdrawn at the request of university authorities) The Practical Economics And Business Model Methodology Of Organised Political Homicide by Batchelor Degree course scholarship student Gary Banomena (current company president), then at the Central University of Indiana:
(Subsection Collateral Damage Opportunism): ‘Depending on their size, sophistication and frequently the personal quirks and specific motives of those involved in political homicide scenarios, collateral damage to bystanders and unintended victims and/or property is almost inevitable. Despite the most careful planning, unforeseen consequential death and injury and miscellaneous destruction are inherent. Therefore, all operational protocols must allow and provide contingency for capitalising on the unexpected. These include inconvenient survivors, potentially unfavourable investigative attention and cost overruns.
Media manipulation, where possible, is a key tool in continually enhancing the company profile and professional image to customers. A perception of infallibility in execution is essential to maintain. Liabilities are best presented as assets and traded on accordingly.’
***
Back at our current Albany operational headquarters and manning the switchboard on a morning shift, my very next received coded telephone enquiry is about arranging an induced corporate chair suicide. They want the executive reassignment subject to dig his own grave first in a hypnotic trance. A clincher I also found problematic.
‘We heard that could be done on the Plastic Fantastic grapevine’; they said.
[Image Credit : Photo by Dylann Hendricks | 딜란 on Unsplash ]
by 
Edward St. Boniface
Latest posts by Edward St. Boniface (see all)
- Zero Points Of Articulation - December 11, 2023
Absolutely loved it. Quirky, original and very entertaining. I imagine if Thomas Pynchon decided to write a novel about the activities of Permindex it might read something like this :)
I really liked this. It’s bizarre and surreal. Think of a conversation in Alice in Wonderland meets a script by David Lynch by way of this scene Inremember of movie producera pitching ideas while on cocaine. Nothing really makes sense but it follows a clear logic, which makes your brain start pushing images to try to make sense of it. This was really cool.