Another woman just came by, collecting for the Mothers March against Muscular Dystrophy. I gave her a quarter. Where was I? Oh, yes: James Joyce had five letters in both his front name and his hind name, so he was worth looking into. A Portrait of the Artist has five chapters, all well and good, but Ulysses has 18 chapters, a stumper, until I remembered that 5 + 18 = 23. How about Finnegans Wake? Alas, that has 17 chapters, and I was bogged down for a while.
Trying another angle, I wondered if Frank Sullivan, the poor cluck who got shot instead of John at the Biograph Theatre that night, could have lingered until after midnight, dying on July 23 instead of July
22 as usually stated. I looked it up in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days. Poor Frank, sad to say, died before midnight, but Toland included an interesting detail, which I told you that night at the Seminary bar:
23 people died of heat prostration that day in Chicago. He added something else: 17 people had died of heat prostration the day before. Why did he mention that? I'm sure he doesn't know- but there it was again, 23 and 17. Maybe something important is going to happen in the year 2317? I couldn't check that, of course (you can't navigate precisely in the Morgensheutegesternwelt), so I went back to 1723, and struck golden apples. That was the year Adam Smith and Adam Weishaupt were both born (and Smith published The Wealth of Nations the same year Weishaupt revived the Illuminati: 1776.)
Well, 2 + 3 = 5, fitting the Law of Fives, but 1+7 = 8, fitting nothing. Where did that leave me? Eight, I reflected, is the number of letters in Kallisti, back to the golden apple again, and 8 is also 23, hot damn. Naturally, it came as no surprise when the 8 defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, which grew out of our little Convention Week Carnival, were tried on the 23rd floor of the Federal Building, amid a flurry of synchronicity- a Hoffman among the defendants, a Hoffman as judge; the Illuminati pyramid, or Great Seal of the U.S. right inside the door of the building, and a Scale getting worse abuse than the other defendants; five-letter names and proliferating-Abbie, Davis, Foran, Scale, Jerry Rubin (twice), and the clincher, Clark (Ramsey, not Captain) who was torpedoed and sunk by the judge before he could testify.
I got interested in Dutch Shultz because he died on October 23. A cluster of synchronicity, that man: he ordered the shooting of Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll (remember Mad Dog, Texas); Coll was shot on 23rd Street, when he was 23 years old; and Charlie Workman, who allegedly shot Schultz, served 23 years in prison for it (although rumor has it that Mendy Weiss- two five-letter names, again- did the real shooting.) Does 17 come in? You bet Shultz was first sentenced to prison at the age of 17.
Around this time I bought Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, thinking the plot might parallel some Illuminati operations. Imagine how I felt when Chapter Two began, "23 hours and 17 minutes ago, a flying saucer landed in Iowa…"
And, in New York, Peter Jackson is trying to get the next issue of Confrontation out on time- although the office is still a shambles, the editor and star researcher have disappeared, the best reporter has gone ape and claims to be at the bottom of the Atlantic with a wax tycoon, and the police are hounding Peter to find out why the first two detectives assigned to the case can't be located. Sitting in his apartment (now the magazine's office) in his shut and shorts, Peter dials his phone with one hand, adding another crushed cigarette to the pile in the ashtray with the other. Throwing a manuscript onto a basket marked "Ready for Printer," he crosses off "lead article- The Youngest Student Ever Admitted to Columbia Tells Why He Dropped Out by L. L. Durrutti" from a list on the pad before him. His pencil moves down to the bottom, "Book Review," as he listens to the phone ring. Finally, he hears the click of a lifted receiver and a rich, flutey voice says, "Epicene Wildeblood here."
"Got your book review ready, Eppy?"
"Have it tomorrow, dear boy. Can't be any faster, honestly!"
'Tomorrow will do," Peter says writing call again-A.M. next to "Book Review."
"It's a dreadfully long monster of a book," Wildeblood says pettishly, "and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent- no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors- whom I've never heard of- have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish, but I'll have a perfectly devastating review ready for you by tomorrow noon."
"Well, we don't expect you to read every book you review," Peter says mollifyingly, "just so long as you can be entertaining about them."
"The Foot Fetishist Liberation Front will be participating in the rally at the UN building," Joe Malik said, as George and Peter and he were affixing their black armbands.
"Christ," Jackson said disgustedly.
"We can't afford to take that attitude," Joe said severely. "The only hope for the Left at this time is coalition politics. We can't exclude anybody who wants to join us."
"I've got nothing against faggots personally," Peter begins ("Gays," Joe says patiently). "I've got nothing against Gays personally," Peter goes on, "but they are a bringdown at rallies. They just give God's Lightning more evidence to say we're all a bunch of fruits. But, OK, realism is realism, there are a lot of them, and they swell our ranks, and all that, but, Jesus, Joe. These toe freaks are a splinter within a splinter. They're microscopic."
"Don't call them toe freaks," Joe says. "They don't like that."
A woman from the Mothers March Against Psoriasis just came by with another collection box. I gave her a quarter, too. The marching mothers are going to strip Moon of his bread if this keeps up.
Where was I? I meant to add, in relation to the Dutch Shultz shooting that Marty Krompier, who ran the policy racket in Harlem, was also shot on October 23, 1935. The police asked him if there was a connection with phlegmatic Flegenheimer's demise and he said, "It's got to be one of them coincidences." I wonder how he emphasized that- "one of them coincidences" or "one of them coincidences"? How much did he know?
That brings me to the 40 enigma. As pointed out, 1 + 7 = 8, the number of letters in Kallisti. 8 x 5 = 40.
More interestingly, without invoking the mystic 5, we still arrive at 40 by adding 17 + 23. What, then, is the significance of 40? I've run through various associations-Jesus had his 40 days in the desert, Ali Baba had his 40 thieves, Buddhists have their 40 meditations, the solar system is almost exactly 40 astronomical units in radius (Pluto yo-yos a bit)-but I have no definite theory yet…
The color television set in the Three Lions Pub in the Tudor Hotel at Forty-second Street and Second Avenue shows the white-helmeted men carrying wooden crosses fall back as the blue-helmeted men carrying billy clubs move forward. The CBS camera pans over the plaza. There are five bodies on the ground scattered like flotsam tossed on a beach by a receding wave. Four of them are moving, making slow efforts to get up. The fifth is not moving at all.
George said, "I think that's the guy we saw getting clubbed. My God, I hope he isn't dead."
Joe Malik said, "If he is dead, it may get people to demand that something be done about God's Lightning."