Until that day comes, I will happily endure the nonsense of overindulged children who are somehow aroused by adolescent pranksterism. Take off your clown suit, Imposter. No one is buying. And let me use this incident to remind my colleagues that our only assurance of purity in ferreting out all things Proppian is evidence from the official record: that which can be confirmed with physical documentation and counterchecked by secondary material. And so, as the title of my column says, let us review what we know so far.
Terrence Propp was born either in Mollusk Cove, New York, or Quinsigamond, Massachusetts, in either 1937 or 1929. It is almost certain that he derives from some arm of the fairly prominent Propp family who had arrived in America at least by 1694, settling in and around the area of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the shadow of Mount Greylock, though there is a dissenting opinion that Propp’s ancestors moved south almost immediately after their arrival in the New World and began a pattern of nomadism that eventually brought them to Mexico by the early 1800s, where they established either a string of homeopathic hospitals or a museum to catalog and house native Mexican artwork. I, personally, find this school of thought quite unlikely, based for the most part on far-flung conjecture and self-styled theory.
As a side note, I will mention that we are fairly certain that Propp’s maternal great-great-granduncle was one Balthus Nixford, a once notorious and now, sadly, forgotten painter who in 1837 was charged, according to documents kept in Quinsigamond’s own Center for Historical Bibliography, with “the creation and dissemination of lewd, obscene, indecent, and un-Christian pictures designed to incite wicked and lacivious yearnings into the minds of the populace.” All of Nixford’s work was burned in the “October Bonfire of ’38” and the artist was driven from the city and banished “for the duration of his natural life.” And so we see, apostles, history, that relentless nightmare, repeats itself with a tasteless vengeance. And now, all these years later, we have been given a new artist to drive underground with the abundance of our ignorance and intolerance.
The source of Terrence Propp’s primary education is lost to us, but we believe his undergraduate years were spent, at least partially, either locally here at the College of St. Ignatius, or at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. There is one recently bandied theory that he pursued a now-defunct correspondence school whose application materials were once offered on the flaps of matchbooks dispensed at Orsi’s Rib Room Diner. Transcripts at both St. Ignatius and Cornell are either sealed or missing.
There is conjecture, sponsored by the presence of a series of five Southern Pacific landscape pieces, that Propp served in the navy as a signalman shortly before or after his undergraduate education. I should point out that there is also a small pocket of vehement protest that the “Melmoth Island Shots,” as they have come to be known, are talented forgeries. Propp finished his formal education sometime in the late 1950s and either remained in (or came to settle in) Quinsigamond. It is possible, some would say likely, that for a time during this period he supported himself by selling balloons to children in Salisbury Park.
Certainly, it is during this time, in the early sixties, when his work began appearing in local galleries such as f.46 and the Riis. Before his death, gallery owner Nigel “Naggy” Moholy, in an interview, recounted that he never actually met Propp face-to-face and that the artist insisted on an elaborate scheme for the delivery of his work. Moholy said he would receive a phone call, at times in the middle of the night, and the caller would simply declare, “Say Cheese!”, and Moholy would then have to hurry down to Gompers Train Station, walk to a specific trash can and reach inside where he would find Propp’s latest offerings wrapped in “a kind of white wax paper, like the kind they use in the butcher shops for wrapping meat and fish.”
As the years went on, however, the late-night phone calls grew less and less frequent and, ironically, as Propp’s work began to receive more, and more acclaim and attention, his output, or, we should say, his publicly presented output, became minimal in number if not quality. There has been no confirmed sighting of work by Terrence Propp for over a decade now. There has been no confirmed sighting of or communication with the man himself in at least that long.
Rumors, of course, proliferate in the absence of concrete fact. And we here at Underexposed are committed to quashing rumor and proliferating truth. And all for one simple reason that is, ultimately, our credo: Terrence Propp’s work is the most perfect key we have found yet to unlock the primal, sensual, carnal heart of humankind, to halt and reverse the devotion taking place in each of us. Godspeed.
13
Even on Musuraca Avenue they’re a strange sight: Jakob and Felix Kinsky leading a single-file parade of Grey Roaches. The Roaches are all dressed in requisite gang colors, a loose facsimile of the standard uniform from a century ago in the Talmud schools of Old Bohemia — black-on-black wool suits, white cotton shirts, the thin black ties that Felix has had customized with a print design of tiny grey cockroaches. Jakob is dressed similarly, and he’s got his ever present Seitz 16 mm up on his shoulder. Felix can’t stand the old style of dress. We live in this country now, he thinks, we should act like the natives.
“Are you nervous?” Felix asks, feeling smug and a little wired.
“I hate to disappoint you,” Jakob said, “but there’s always the chance he got the money together.”
Felix gives a barking laugh. “I can see why your father has left collections to me. He won’t have the money, Jakob. It’s not going to happen that way. You better prepare yourself. You’re going to have to use the Roaches tonight. You better be ready to give the word. Or find someplace else to sleep tonight.”
Jakob stops at the corner, looks at his cousin through the Seitz, shoots a few seconds of film.
“Don’t worry about me, cuz,” he says. “I always do what I have to do.”
They cross the street onto Ruttenberg, the Roaches staying in an ordered line like some sacred and retro fire drill. They’re the oddest muscle in Bangkok Park these days, but they’re proving themselves as disciplined and dangerous as any of their rivals. They’re more quiet than the Granada Street Popes. More stable than the Tonton Loas. Free from the internal strife that seems to constantly grip the Castlebar Road Boys.
The Roaches are led by Ivan “Huck” Hrabal, a sixteen-year-old refugee out of Poric just before the plague and the blockades. Huck lived for a month in the hull of a freighter, subsisting on tins of bootleg caviar and a found sack of half-rotten oranges. He’s a confirmed knife man, could give the city’s chief pathologist a pang of professional envy. His only weakness is his barely concealed passion for his second in command, Vera Gottwald. No one seems to know a thing about Vera G’s past. She simply showed up at the St. Vitus one night; Papa Hermann gave her a meal of beetroot soup and smoked curd cheese and turned her over to Felix.
Huck and Vera supervise a flock of eighteen sanctioned meatboys, grooming them into a cadre of warrior monks for the day when, as Felix promises, the city will exist solely for the benefit of the Family Kinsky. For now, the Roaches keep busy with a routine of standard gang-biz: extortion, black marketeering, pharmaceuticals, and the usual hit-and-run work necessary for making and occasionally expanding the Kinsky territory.