Haunted Legends (2 page)

A lot of my memories of Flying Dutchman Fashion Promotions and our boss, Bud Van Brunt, are far from pleasant. But recalling those days I felt there were loose ends, things that still bothered me. Since I don’t drink, I brought along some Percocet left over from a recent dental episode. Of course I don’t do drugs anymore either, but, hey, no one’s perfect.

Sunday afternoon six of us gathered in Eddie’s apartment. The Major I see all the time. Jay Glass writes music criticism for the
Wall Street Journal
. He and I have friends and interests in common, and have run into each other over the years. I’d come to the conclusion that Jay wasn’t gay or straight, wasn’t interested in music or anything but being at or near the center of attention.

The others were little Mimsey Friedman who writes fashion columns for
Harper’s Bazaar,
Douglas Lotts who left the agency to go to graduate school and still teaches college in New Jersey, and Dawn Boothby, a girl from a good family who has a nice career in public relations. It had been awhile since I’d seen any of them.

The Major had organized the sorting and boxing, ordered pizza, and set us to work as we arrived. “Ceremonies for the dead, such as this, are the only real rituals in circles like ours,” she announced. “Births, the few that occur in our set, are preplanned with hereditary diseases taken into account, sex selected, time and place of delivery finalized. Weddings, well they’re pretty much just place markers in this day and age. But death, oh death, my dears, that’s often a surprise and nearly always very final.” Major Barbara writes long, critically celebrated fantasy novels and it shows.

We made it through a large chunk of Eddie Acker’s possessions: bagged the clothes for the Salvation Army; boxed kitchen appliances, golf clubs, and trout fishing equipment to be shipped to his sister; and tossed away magazines with names like
Man Eater
featuring young ladies wearing lion and tiger masks and nothing else. None of us had seen anything quite like them.

As we worked, we talked a lot about our old boss, that legendary horror Bud Van Brunt.

“Satan in a Brooks Brothers gray flannel suit,” the Major said.

“The scent of sulfur barely hidden by the Vitalis aftershave and gin breath,” someone added.

When I thought of Bud Van Brunt, instead of his round, flushed face and big bald dome, I saw a pumpkin lit from within by flames. That image made me go into the bathroom and take half a Percocet. For the next couple of hours things had a nice, warm glow.

Eddie Ackers hardly got mentioned at all. “Poor Eddie,” someone remarked when we were done packing him up. “Kind of an empty life.”

“He endured ten or fifteen years at Flying Dutchman Fashion Promotions, and when Van Brunt was finally dragged off to hell, Eddie took over the business. I’m sure he considered that worth the price of his soul,” Jay Glass replied.

“He was some kind of relative of Van Brunt’s. A nephew-in-law, or something,” I said.

“What do you say we adjourn?” asked the Major.

“Where to?” I asked.

“The Knickerbocker Holiday,” she said. “Or ‘Knicks’ as they call it now. It’s where dear Eddie breathed his last.”

“Isn’t that a little macabre?” Mimsey Friedman asked.

“He would have wanted us to go there. He may even be waiting for us,” she added. Mimsey flinched, Jay Glass grimaced, but the rest of us chuckled.

It was already dark when we hit the street. The place where Eddie Ackers had last lived was one of those high-rise monstrosities recently sprouted along Sixth Avenue in the Twenties. “It’s always a cozy occasion when you’ve beat the reaper and are in a celebratory mood,” I said. By then I’d taken the other half of the Percocet.

A bit farther uptown, just below where Broadway crosses Sixth Avenue and forms Herald Square, is a block of low buildings that the wreckers have passed by. In their midst stands an ancient four-story, wide-front building with a huge neon
KNICKS
sign hanging out front.

“The building dates back to the 1840s. It got landmarked as a historic spot so it can’t be torn down,” said Jay Glass, who’d obviously done research. “That probably keeps anyone from trying to redevelop the rest of the block.”

When we all were young and Manhattan was wonderment, the Knickerbocker Holiday Tavern on the outskirts of the jumping, vibrant Garment
District was an oasis for junior copywriters and assistant art directors. Back then the Knickerbocker had a colonial motif and the waitresses wore Dutch bonnets and wooden clogs that we’d all found delightfully campy.

Now the Garment District, with its thousands of employees and streets choked with racks of clothes, is a fading memory. And all that’s left of Dutch New York is an occasional street or building with a name like Gansevoort, Stuyvesant, Roosevelt, Astor, or Vanderbilt.

We stood on the sidewalk and read the two brass plaques that flanked the door. One said, “On this site dating back to Dutch Colonial times was a roadhouse and coach stop.” The other told us, “When Herald Square was the theater district, this building housed The Knickerbocker Holiday Tavern, an actors’ gathering spot. George M. Cohan is said to have written ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’ while sitting at the bar.”

Inside, KNICKS was all leather and steel. One large-screen TV showed the Giants playing football in West Coast sunshine. The other had guys in blazers with network emblems on them working out the meaning of the baseball playoffs. The sound was off. Sunday evenings were obviously a down time, the place was big and kind of empty.

We took a table in a secluded spot in the rear and looked around for something we could recognize. “They still have a couple of artifacts from the old roadhouse,” the Major said. “That added to the charm of the old Knickerbocker. Here they just look out of place.”

“Old New York was in no way charming,” Jay said. “The American Revolution involved skullduggery and double-dealing, families divided, plenty of traitors and spies. Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold both slept in the old roadhouse.”

“Together?” several of us wanted to know. Jay grimaced at our stupidity and shut up. In retrospect we should have let him talk.

Our server, a dark young lady with long black hair, appeared, announced herself as Benicia, and took our drink orders. I ordered club soda. Major Barbara looked up at the last minute and said to her, “Pardon my asking. But by any chance were you on duty when there was an unfortunate episode with a patron a couple of weeks ago?”

Benicia’s head jerked in surprise. “Yes. It was creepy but I’m sorry for him. He came in from the street, went right past the hostess. Happy Hour is a busy time and the place was crowded. The guy was flushed bright red and he
was walking funny. I thought he was already drunk. The manager was headed his way and then the customer went flat on his face. They called EMS but he was dead. How did you hear about it?”

“We knew him. His name was Eddie Ackers.”

“I’m so sorry,” the server said.

“Where did he fall?” asked Major Barbara.

“Right about where you’re sitting.”

When she left, Doug Lotts asked, “What on earth led him to come here to die?”

“This would be the perfect spot for a Van Brunt relative to seek out in his last moments. I would imagine it has the strongest magic in the neighborhood,” said the Major.

“Magic?” I asked, looking around. “Where?”

“Just because a sacred place has been defiled does not mean it’s without power.” She smiled an eldritch smile and I wondered what game was being played.

“Poor Eddie,” Mimsey remarked. “Remember how Van Brunt used to ream him out in front of everyone?”

“Was there anybody the Flying Dutchman didn’t do that to?” I asked, and remembered a face like a fist being thrust into mine and the words “Make the suit copy read like a man wrote it, you little pussy.”

“Each and every one of us was told we were fired at least once a week,” Dawn Boothby said.

Van Brunt’s specialty was hiring those who could be had cheaply—kids in need of experience like my friends, people like Ackers who had been on the skids, young screwups like me who were being given one last chance in the Garment District.

His brochure described the company as “An Agency on Seventh Avenue and in the Heart of the U.S.” What we did was provide flashy copy and artwork for dreary little department stores in the places around the country most of us had run away from.

Behind his back, everyone in the business called Van Brunt “The Flying Dutchman.” His temper, even in an industry whose foundations rested on argument and insult, was a legend. At least once a day he’d threaten castration and death to someone he was talking with on the phone.

Jason said, “Remember how he’d end a conversation by screaming, ‘It’ll
be hard for you to walk with my size eleven shoe lodged in your fucking colon’?”

“Dear God, what a bottom-feeder he was,” the Major remarked. “And we were what he fed on.”

The drinks arrived and for a couple of minutes there was silence.

Then Dawn Boothby asked, “Remember the two-page apron spread Van Blunt had me do for that place down in Georgia? I still remember coming in one morning just after I’d started to work for him and on my desk were pictures of these tacky aprons and a note from the Dutchman telling me that I should make the copy sing. About aprons! Who ever imagined that people still wore them? And what song do you sing about aprons? He must have demanded a hundred rewrites.”

I caught a moment of amusement on the Major’s face. She and Mimsey exchanged a glance. The apron ad was a joke they had played on Dawn. After all this time she still hadn’t figured that out.

To change the subject, I said, “Remember when we discovered that the villain in the ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ the bully who chases Ichabod Crane out of town, is called Brom Bones but his real name is Van Brunt?”

“Bud talked about that in his rants,” Mimsey said quietly. “How his family had money and Washington Irving had envied them and made up the story about his ancestor stealing Katrina Van Tassel. So the legend had some truth to it. On the other hand, around 1980 I was told he had died in the mental ward of a hospital and what he said could just have been insanity.”

She looked troubled, and I remembered that it was an open secret back in the day that she and the Dutchman were having an affair. And I could easily imagine how awful that must have been.

Jay Glass sat beside her. They seemed to be very close and not really happy.

“Irving told his stories without any mention of the horrors of war,” he said. “But the Hudson Valley town of Sleepy Hollow would have been just a few years removed from Indian raids and military occupation. The Headless Horseman was a local ghost story about a Hessian mercenary fighting for the British who lost his head to a cannonball and rode out each night to search for it.”

The talk about war reminded me of one night back at the agency. Eddie Ackers and I were working very late, me trying to squeeze copy onto catalog pages and Eddie doing the picture mock-ups for a chain of department stores
in the Pacific Northwest. Bud Van Brunt had left for the day but, of course, he came back, loaded. The top of his bald head was the bright scarlet it turned when he got smashed.

He immediately went after Eddie as one more of his wife’s freeloading, worthless family. I kept my head down to avoid notice and because this was embarrassing.

The two fell into a quarrel about which war was tougher, WW2 or Korea. At one point Ackers said, “To be a hero in WW2 all you needed to do was get drafted. In Korea you had to die falling on a grenade to save the platoon for them to notice you.”

Before Van Brunt could reply, Ackers got up and walked out saying he needed to take a break. I was surprised the Dutchman didn’t tell him not to come back. But at that moment, I guess he needed him too much.

Instead he turned on me. Vietnam was at full boil at that moment, and he asked how I’d managed to dodge the draft. I’m sure he suspected they didn’t want me because I was gay. He stood very close to me. Sharp as the moment it had happened, I remembered how he stuck his face near mine and whispered low, like this was a seduction, that I was a worthless pervert, a drug freak, and coward.

He was baiting me and coming on to me at the same time. I should have walked out, but I was in a chaotic living situation with a pair of people I loved, I was strung out, I needed the money. I wanted to run him through with the scissors on my desk.

Just then, some other part of his brain seemed to open up. He began talking about war and the red menace: Hessians leaping out of sewers with bayonets, commies parachuting out of the skies to conquer New York. This, too, was scary as hell and evoked pumpkin eyes lighted by candles and dark riders in the night. But it was routine; we’d all heard him do this stuff. Back then Jay Glass had said, “Past and future loop right over the present, like a skater making a figure eight on the ice.” Glass had seemed fascinated by Van Brunt. That long ago night Ackers came back and said we needed to be left alone to finish the catalog.

The only part of this memory that I told to the rest of the table was, “Once I heard the Dutchman say that Mohawks were going to come down from Canada and take back New York. I was kind of impressed with his multidimensional paranoia.”

“He had a bit of a time-dislocation problem. It’s as if he came out of the past and into our future,” said Glass.

“He’d had a very bad war,” someone said. I doubted he’d had a bad war, Van Brunt had been an officer in occupied Europe and my guess was he’d enjoyed every bloody, bullying minute of it.

“And peace wasn’t very satisfactory for him either,” someone else added.

Then Benicia was back with another round of drinks and plates of chicken wings and fried mozzarella. I got up to look for the restroom. The Major was on her feet also and we wandered past the bar.

“Time dislocation is right,” she said to me. “At first glance, with his red face and head, Van Brunt looked like a burgher in an old painting. But he had a monster inside him and when that emerged . . .” She went past the end of the very long bar and looked in a corner. “Remember this?” she asked.