Finally, someone came to him, propped a sweater or newspaper — I can’t remember — under his head.
“Call a fucking ambulance, for chrissakes!”
The fat man’s chest was still heaving when the ambulance from Coney Island Hospital got there. It seemed to have taken hours. That deadly silence long broken, the crowd buzzed in my ears. I strung together a narrative out of loose bits and pieces of conversation.
The man on his back was the manager of Wolfe Motors, the Ford dealership on Coney Island Avenue and Gravesend Neck Road. He had picked up payroll cash at the bank across the street and then gone to the post office. When he emerged from the post office, a white guy, or maybe Spanish — that’s what people called Puerto Ricans then, when spic seemed inappropriate — ran up to the fat man, shot him in the belly, grabbed the mail and the money, and ran. Sometimes when I think about that day, I imagine that I caught a glimpse of him or heard his frantic footfalls as he fled. But I didn’t.
The guy’s chest stopped heaving. The ambulance men — I don’t think anyone had yet coined the term Emergency Medical Technician — tried all sorts of things to revive him, to get his chest to move even a little bit. The ambulance men lifted the fat guy onto a gurney. One put a stethoscope to his chest. The other did something that is so ingrained in my memory that I can’t imagine forgetting it, ever. He removed the fat man’s left sock.
The sock was black Banlon and thoroughly worn, most of elasticity gone. With the sock removed, the ambulance man ran a tongue depressor along the naked sole of the fat guy’s pale foot. Even in the midst of it all, I thought that tongue depressor thing was bizarre, almost medieval. I’ve since learned he was checking for something called a Babinski reflex. As it happens, newborns and dead men don’t have them. To the ambulance men, the fat guy, once declared dead, was an object, no more worthy of their attention than the crumpled sock on the sidewalk.
He lay on the stretcher wearing one sock, his shirt with the little red dot, torn open. The entrance wound, now clear to see, was tiny still. There just had to be more blood, I thought, for a man to die. But the fact remained unchanged: The man was dead. I didn’t yet have an understanding of internal bleeding or of how bullets, as they slow, chew up human tissue. When, in a daze, I left to go to work, I noticed it was still a beautiful day. The world had not stopped turning. Yet everything was different.
I never knew the dead man’s name. I suppose I might have known it for a brief time and forgotten. There were posters put up around the neighborhood by his family and the cops. But the posters faded and frayed and fell off the telephone poles like the ones for missing pets or the guy who’ll rake your yard for ten bucks. To the best of my knowledge, the murderer’s never been apprehended.
Near the conclusion of my novel The James Deans, the protagonist-P.I., Moe Prager, having learned the truth about a thirty-year-old murder, goes to reveal that truth to the victim’s long-suffering mother. But as he steps out of his car to confront the dead boy’s parent with the truth, he stops himself and returns to his car. For at that moment, Moe learns the lesson I learned over thirty years ago.
In my writing, I try always to keep that day in mind. Whenever the urge strikes me to get too flippant or fanciful about murder, I remember. I remember that this nameless man had a family, and that for them his loss is nothing like the extended absence of a vaguely known kid from junior high. For them there is no such thing as arm’s length or closure or justice. Serious crime is not about glamour or fame or gangsters with funny nicknames. Murder is about pain and loss. Murder is no roses for Bubbeh.
The Brooklyn Bogeyman
by C. J. Sullivan
Bensonhurst
The Bogeyman came to life in New York City in 1977. The fiend was born in Brooklyn in 1953, an unwanted child who was put up for adoption because his biological father — a well-off Long Island businessman screwing around with a Brooklyn housewife — would have nothing to do with this unwanted progeny. The kid’s penniless mother had no choice but to dump him on a family that wanted a child but were unable to conceive. Little did the couple know that the bundle full of joy they took out of Brooklyn was a monster.
The Furies must have been full of wicked humor as they walked the halls of that Brooklyn hospital on June 1, 1953. As soon as the Bogeyman was born he was taken out of Brooklyn. The Bronx and later Queens would have to deal with him as he morphed into a psychopath. In 1976 and ’77, as the evil started to cut short the lives of young kids from Queens and the Bronx, the people of Brooklyn thought they had dodged a bullet.
“Son of Sam is too scared to come into Brooklyn,” was a common boast of young Brooklyn men.
But like the Bogeyman of legend, he waited until everyone figured they were safe. Then he sneaked in during his last stages of malevolence and broke out his final act of wrath. And there have been rumors that Berkowitz’s killing in Bensonhurst may have been recorded and made into a snuff film.
David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” appeared in 1977 New York City as the place was at its nadir. His killing spree added to the woes of a seemingly dying metropolis. It was a city that was told to — in a famous Daily News headline — “Drop Dead” by President Ford. The coffers of the treasury were empty. Crime was rampant and the city’s answer was to lay off cops. Arson became pandemic, and with the ruined budget new firemen couldn’t be hired to help already overworked smoke eaters. If you were in New York in 1977, you knew murder and mayhem. Not much scared you, because if it did you would have moved out.
In fact, between 1970 and 1980 the population of New York dropped by 800,000 people. Many left, few moved in. New York was not a choice destination in those days. In 1976, when the Bogeyman started to come alive, he killed one person. Others, full of passion, jealousy, viciousness, evil, poverty, and anger killed another 1,621 people in New York that year. In 1977, the Bogeyman killed five and other killers came up with 1,548 murders. In those two years, 3,175 people were murdered in New York, yet it was the Bogeyman’s six killings that made the headlines. People couldn’t get enough of the story once it broke in the daily papers.
Everyone knew about muggings, shoot-outs, and drug wars. But for someone to come out of the shadows at night and gun down innocent girls and boys, well, that was beyond even a New Yorker’s ken. In the Big Apple, you’re usually killed for a reason, not just randomly picked out by a madman and slaughtered.
The origin of the word Bogeyman is hard to trace. In the southern regions of America, he is called Boogerman — elsewhere the standard appellation of Bogeyman applies. Some think it came out of Indonesia where the word bugis means pirates. Pirates were known to steal children and take them away from their homes to work on their ships. So parents would warn their children to be good or the Bugis would get them.
The Bogeyman’s legend has lasted and thrived for hundreds of years. Sam Raimi, the director of Spider-Man and one of the classic horror films of all time, The Evil Dead, is fascinated by the Bogeyman. Raimi once said, “He’s a mythical character that is the stuff of stories of generations. He is a horrible creature that consumes human beings...”