If I can't live as I please, let me die when I choose is the last line spoken by Clark Gable in the screenplay.
The fact that these phrases overlap certain themes in this novel (and in Joyce's Ulysses) is either coincidence or synchronicity- take your choice. Manhattan Melodrama, you might be interested to know, was playing at the Biograph Theatre on the night of July 22, 1934, and was the last film seen by the man who was shot outside and identified as John Herbert Dillinger.
2. What was the Masonic signal of distress used by the grocer B. F. Morgan when Dillinger tried to rob him in 1924?
Answer: It consists in holding your arms outward, bent upward 90 degrees at the elbow, and shouting, "Will nobody help the widow's son?"
3. Is there really a secret passage beneath the Meditation Room in the UN building?
Answer: If so, we haven't been able to find it. Other spooky secrets about that room, however, are revealed in The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye, by Robert Keith Spencer (Christian Book Club of America, 1964).
4. What was the Erotion of Adam Weishaupt mentioned by Hagbard in the First Trip?
Answer: The word translates, loosely, as "love-in," and the idea is basically the same. (See the books of Nesta Webster and John Robison cited in the text.) Now do you believe in a conspiracy?
5. Did Al Capone really help the FBI set up the man who was shot at the Biograph Theatre on July 22, 1934?
Answer: That's one of the more plausible arguments in Dillinger: Dead or Alive, by Jay Nash and Ron Offen.
6. If no animals were reported missing from local zoos, how is that Robert Simpson of Kansas City was found dead with his throat torn as if by "the talons of some enormous beast?"
Answer: See the sequel, The Homing Pigeons.
7. If Simon Moon majored in mathematics and was so obsessed with numerology, why didn't he ever notice the most significant 23 in mathematical history-the 23 definitions that open Euclid 's Geometry?
Answer: Perhaps for the same reason that the road from Dayton, Ohio, to New Lebanon, Ohio, was due east when Joe Malik drove it on June 25, 1969, but has always been due west on every day before and since then. Or maybe by the same processes that allowed Joe to see a Salem commercial on his TV set in the mid-1970s, although cigarette advertising was banned from television in 1971.
8. Did Smiling Jim Trepomena achieve the fame he had sought?
Answer: No. Dr. Vulcan Troll's definitive history of the Great Quake, When a State Dies, mentions on page 123 that "no American Eagle has since been reported, and we can only assume that this species was another victim of nature's mindless rampage on that tragic May 1." On page 369, Dr. Troll mentions, among prominent casualties, "The famous Cincinnati lawyer and proponent of censorship James J. Trepomena." Neither he nor anyone else ever connected the two occurrences.
9. Where are the missing eight appendices?
Answer: Censored.
APPENDIX NUN: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT SOME OF THE CHARACTERS
THE PURPLE SAGE. An imaginary Chaoist philospher invented by Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (another imaginary Chaoist philosopher).
LORD OMAR KHAYAM RAVENHURST. An imaginary Chaoist philosopher invented by Mr. Kerry Thornley of Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Thornley was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's, was accused of complicity in the John Kennedy assassination by District Attorney Jim Garrison, and is the author of llluminati Lady, an endless epic poem which you really ought to read.
GEORGE DORN. His maternal grandfather, old Charlie Bishop, was once a patient of the famous Doctor William Carlos Williams. The Bishops came to New Jersey in 1723, having left Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 under something of a cloud. Folks in the Nutley-Clifton-Passaic-Paterson area always have a good word for the Bishops, though. But the Dorns were all troublemakers, and George's paternal grandfather, Big Bill Dora, was so indiscreet as to get killed by cops during the Paterson silk-mill strike of 1922.
HERACLEITUS. He was apt to say odd things. Once he even wrote that "Religious ceremonies are unholy." A strange duck.
THE SQUIRREL. A set of receptor organs transmitting information through a central nervous system to a small brain programmed for only a few rudimentary decisions-but, in this, he was not far inferior to most of our characters.
REBECCA GOODMAN. Her maiden name was Murphy, and she was named after Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. You thought she was Jewish, didn't you?
THE DEAD EGYPTIAN MOUTH-BREEDERS. There were five of them, of course.
DANNY PRICEFIXER. Shot in the line of duty two years after the events of this story. Loved the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
ADAM WEISHAUPT. "He's a deep one," they used to say on the faculty of the University of Ingolstadt, "you never know what he's really thinking."
CARMEL. One of his girls once cajoled a Hollywood character actor into calling him on the phone and pretending to be a researcher for the Kinsey Institute, seeking an interview. Carmel couldn't see any money in it and was trying to end the conversation when the actor asked stuffily, "Well, all we want to know, actually, is do you have intercourse with your mother regularly, or does everybody in Las Vegas call you ' Carmel the Motherfucker' for some other reason?" For once Carmel was speechless. The girl spread the story, and everybody in town was laughing about it for weeks.
PETER JACKSON. His great-grandfather was a slave. His son became the first President of the Luna Federation after the rebellion of the moon colonists in 2025. Much further back, a more remote ancestor was a king of Atlantis; and way in the future, a descendant was a slave on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. (Peter was one of the crew when Hagbard finally blasted off for the stars in 1999). that's the way the cookie crumbles; and Peter had an intuitive sense of this paradoxical fatality, which caused him to tell Eldridge Cleaver once, "People who say 'You're either part of the solution or part of the problem* are themselves part of the problem." (Cleaver replied, wittily, "Fuck you.")
THE LAB CHIEF WHO WAS DISINTERESTED IN ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. He later cracked up and wrote letters to the newspapers attacking the entire chemobiological warfare program of the United States government. Spent the last seventeen years of his life receiving treatment in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., occupying the same quarters that once housed the ingenious poet Ezra Pound. His rantings were taken seriously in certain places, especially among some leftward-leaning fellow scientists, but the Vice-President described them to the press as "the despondent demagogy of a paranoid pedant." A sample of the man's delusions, from a letter to the three top television networks (never quoted on newscasts because it was too controversial): "The boast of the 19th century was its conquest of these accursed plagues that attack men, women, and helpless infants indifferently. What shall be said of the 20th century, which has recreated them, at great expense and through the efforts of thousands of brilliant but perverted scientific minds, and then stored them live in installations throughout the country, where it is virtually certain, statistically, that an accident will unleash them upon an unsuspecting public, sooner or later?" (Loonies often harbor morbid fears of that sort.) The poor man never responded favorably to any of the efforts of his psychiatrists, even though they gave him ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) so often that his brain was practically fried to the crispness of a Howard Johnson omelette by the time he finally died.
ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. A life form that could exist only by destroying other life-forms; in this respect, it was like many of us. The first of the products of Charlie Mocenigo's fertile genius, it could boast only of being ten times as deadly as ordinary anthrax. Insofar as it had consciousness, in a vague and flickering way, it was like that inhabiting a subway train at 5 P.M., concerned only with getting where it was going and then eating. The other strains were much the same, up to Anthrax Leprosy Pi.