Chapter 1 Donny Damon and The New Frontier

Faced with life’s deep dish pie of pain, Donny Damon always ordered his slices á la mode. It was a habit he’d acquired from his old man Harry, who’d been born in a land where the streets were paved with gold, days before the Blizzard of ’88 paralyzed the East Coast, and who did little to hang his hat on until 1923, when Harding’s sudden death out west landed brine-faced Coolidge in the Oval Office.

Silent Cal’s pronouncement that “the chief business of the American people is business” was a turning point for Harry Damon, inspiring the colorless street pug to scrape together whatever cash he could, marry the first woman he could fast-talk in front of an altar and make a go of “Damon Truss & Convalescent Supply” on New York’s Lower East Side. The driving force behind this enterprise’s success was the 35-year-old’s decision to have his child bride strut her fine, precocious stuff behind the shop’s plate-glass window, wearing little beyond a leg cast, neck brace and strategically placed Ace bandages. Since such a display was an insult to community standards, it drew the smutty-minded, bogus lame and halt to his establishment from a twelve-block radius and kept its cash register ringing for as long as Olivia Damon continued her risqué showcase.

Harry’s missus gave the act the hook during FDR’s first administration and would eventually divorce her husband claiming alienation of affection. But by then the small business owner hardly even remembered being married and had gone all in on racketeering practices that expanded Damon Truss ten-fold during the Great Depression. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was piloting a regional wheelchair powerhouse while also heading a body bag monopoly in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Damon’s stranglehold on these markets, however, couldn’t and didn’t last. America’s entry into World War II gave Feds the excuse they’d been waiting for to nationalize his enterprises rather than let Harry spend the next several years dodging profiteering charges.

Being put out to early pasture may have caught the wheelchair king off guard, but it couldn’t keep him and his enormous wad of buyout cash down for long. Within a few months, Mr. Damon was steering his Studebaker President north along the mighty Hudson to a sleepy river town founded by the Dutch and re-christened by the Brits to honor the neatly trimmed juniper bushes surrounding its village green. Or so the story went.

The actual name change to “Carvéd Hedge” dated only from the 1920s, when those eponymous hedges were first planted. Back then, local politicians and the chamber of commerce decided that a little fudged history would attract new business, along with a better class of people, and make the dusty old place a village to be proud of instead of the shoulder-shrug whistlestop it had been sliding into for decades. This effort hadn’t made much of a difference. But every once in a while, a resident would surprise the neighbors, show some talent or initiative and put the community’s general mediocrity to shame.

Sharpie Bev Boslegovich, for example, parleyed her ability to recognize a born patsy when she saw one into a thriving local real-estate business. So when Harry Damon turned his big sedan onto Main Street in 1942, he couldn’t even put the damn thing in park before “Hiya, handsome! Lookin’ to settle down?” came winging his way from under a mop of Shirley Temple curls.

Since sparkplug Bev believed in telling people what they wanted to hear, she gave a twist to her town’s Jazz Age creation myth that a mark like Damon would be powerless to resist. Namely (“Turn left at this corner!”) that an eyesore property, sitting idle on her books for months, had once been the home of a profligate Tory (“You know, before the Revolution.”) who spent the bulk of his fortune developing a topiary wonderland of trees, bushes and shrubs that a small army of gardeners had stripped, clipped, bent, and chiseled into a stunning array of geometric and animal-shaped confections.

Not a word of this was true, of course, but Bev understood Damon had journeyed to her little piece of heaven on earth because he was in the market for prestige as much as a home. To hear her tell it, the property she was hawking was the true inspiration behind the name of the village that tripped so lightly off her tongue. “Why else would they call it Carvéd Hedge?” Bev demanded as much as wondered.

Moved by the realtor’s aggressive eloquence, Damon’s gullibility made him believe wholeheartedly that the unruly mess he was looking at was precisely the spot where a vital breathing European artform had jumped species and taken root in Colonial America. This despite the fact that the “estate,” as Bev called it, was nothing more than a derelict saltbox with a sagging catslide roof, centered on a half-acre lot and thick with oversized, misfit verdure that, if you wanted to believe in it hard enough, at one time might conceivably have served some decorative function.

Boslegovich sealed the deal when she told him, “There are some things you just can’t put a price on.” Damon barely flinched when she quoted a ridiculously high ask and bought the place for cash. “None of that buying-on-time crap for me,” he crowed. It was the maraschino cherry topping a forced retirement that had already started to melt.

The former black marketeer celebrated the purchase by telling his second wife they’d be pulling up stakes and moving by the end of the month. Almost 30 and with no other prospects, sweet-faced Noreen had gladly sold her soul for a meal ticket. Harry’s unexpected good news promised more of the same away from all her friends. “Sounds great, hon,” she told him over a scared-rabbit smile that escaped her husband’s notice. Both partners hoped things would work out for the best. But it soon became apparent that most of the couple’s landmark-status home would have to be demolished, while the few rooms they lived in remained damp and buggy, even with the lights kept on all night.

Harry found comfort in Bev’s assurance that the citizens of Carvéd Hedge would embrace him once the estate’s restoration work was finally complete. But his enthusiasm wilted as progress slowed amid soaring costs that also triggered migraines and stomach problems.

To help get things moving again, Damon decided to restore the topiary designs himself despite his lack of any relevant experience or being in the least bit handy. One hour into this task, he had plummeted from a jerry-rigged work platform and nearly gutted himself on a pair of oversized hedge clippers. These setbacks convinced Harry to invite the local jack-of-all-trades to come out and lend a hand.

It was a less-than-inspired choice even though Eddie Simonson worked cheap, as advertised, and claimed a suspiciously broad range of expertise. Noreen looked on, polishing her nails in the Studebaker that, unlike her prestige country address, didn’t suffer from a silverfish problem, when Eddie’s rusted-out Model A drove up, towing a grimy wagon that had “No Task Too Tough” emblazoned on its sides in big blue and yellow letters.

The handyman’s hardscrabble life and pineapple complexion from youthful acne had made him mad at the world and “set in his ways.” So perhaps Harry shouldn’t have been all that surprised when the complicated trimming instructions for his bushes, trees and shrubs failed to register with Eddie, whose only comment was, "You're shittin' me, right?"

The remark sent Damon’s blood-pressure soaring, off the charts. You could almost hear the WHAP! when frustration blew his fuses, knocked him off his feet and made him curl in a spastic heap, gurgling like an emptying drain as his eyes rolled backward in their sockets.

Noreen and the foreman tossed him in the car then roared to County General where a team of crack MDs immediately knew he had suffered a stroke, though their normal focus was tractor accidents and suicides. How severe, they couldn’t say. But not to worry, his case was “in God’s hands.”

The departure of Harry and his handlers left Eddie in charge of the estate. He had no intention of following Harry’s instructions. Instead, he wondered why the transplanted city dweller would get all fancy on him when a little bare-bones cutting was all that was needed.

That being so, the handyman took a machete from the back of his truck. Rather than restore Harry’s topiary to its fictional glory, he hacked and slashed until all that remained of Harry’s plants stood barely a foot high, with the look and feel of rusty steel wool. He stacked the cuttings he had taken into one big pile then set them alight with kerosene, completing an outrage that would take years to heal, if the mutilated greenery survived at all.

Small wonder then that most Carvéd Hedge residents only let Simonson near their properties to mow the lawn or cart away autumn leaves.

THERE WAS A TIME IN America when anything fancier than a trip to the john meant dressing for the occasion. So when a grocer took a break from visiting his wife for a smoke outside County General, it was only natural that he did so in freshly shined shoes, double-breasted suit and Harry Truman-style floral necktie. The tradesman drew deeply on his Lucky, looking out onto a warm, clear, late September afternoon, "How’s it goin’?" he asked the familiar face that joined him but got no answer. “Doc?” he pressed.

Baylor Tunney, M.D. stripped and tossed his own dead butt then trudged back upstairs. The stroke had turned his patient into an old man with virtually no hope of recovery. There was little they could do for Harry Damon except keep him warm and change him regularly.

Thanksgiving Eve found the doctor and grocer smoking out front again while a nurse and hospital chaplain steered Damon and wife onto oil-stained pavement, amid fading autumn sunlight and the smell of burning leaves. “Whoa, there, big fellah!" the padre cautioned, rasping Harry’s brain like a bottle brush as he bumped his wheelchair off the low curb.

“I got it,” Mrs. Damon said, helping her spouse with the passenger door. His face still looked like it had been split by an ax. She drove home along quiet country roads, passing vegetable, flower and apple cider stands, praying her husband’s sculpted-shrub obsession had atrophied during his hospital stay. Harry clucked unpleasantly throughout their journey. Once they arrived, he scratched at the window like a dog that’s gotta go. Knowing this was not a good sign, she teased “C’mon dummy!” then stood him on his feet and helped him grip his cane. A lolling tongue slurred Damon’s speech as he stutter-stepped out toward the back amid lengthening shadows.

His damaged brain first thought his wife had bought him to the wrong address. All he could see were sprays of brown scrub, around a piece of incinerated lawn that stank. As darkness fell, Damon grasped that the scene spread out before him showed the sad remains of his topiary dreams. The realization hung on him like a lead suit until he noticed the soft glow of lamps coming from his stumpy home. It was those lamps, tended by his wife, that helped something like faith start to grow inside him.

The current situation certainly seemed hopeless, but Harry’s bushes, trees and shrubs would grow back someday. The trick, he knew, despite his impairment, was in the waiting. And if Damon couldn’t manage to hang around himself, the part of his brain that continued to function told him in no uncertain terms, “Bet the sure thing. Pass the topiary torch to a new generation!”

It was tough getting started, but soon he was inching his numbed feet forward, putting his long-term topiary survival plan into preliminary action. The stroke victim stalked his prey, soundlessly entering the house through a heavy back door that realtor Bev claimed had been fashioned by craftsmen wearing three-corner hats. Noreen sat cross-legged on a kitchen stool, clutching a copy of “LIFE” while Charlie McCarthy cracked wise on the Philco.

She didn’t sense his approach, or his pitiless stare as distance closed between them. She had buttered some toast and made a nice cup of tea when hubby’s unzipped lunge caught her off guard. Harry bent her double while the desperate woman threw her beverage at his face. As she aimed, the cup she’d bought at Woolworth’s snapped its flimsy handle, dumping hot Lipton’s into the toaster precisely when Damon thread his needle. Grabbing that juiced appliance, Noreen sparked like a roman candle while the unbroken circuit kept Harry deep inside her.

It was the ride of both their lives. Once the fireworks were over, the husband slid off her, an idiot’s grin on his face, while the wife had literally been shocked into pregnancy with severe burns that forced her to go through the rest of her life without any feeling in her hands.

Bandages from the wrists down notwithstanding, the staff at County General thought God would never allow this unusual conception to impact the health of the couple’s bundle of joy. Noreen wasn’t buying any of that nonsense for a second, but convention at that time being what it was, she had little choice but to bring the pregnancy to term then watch in increasing despair as her son began his stunted march to maturity.

By the time little Donny Damon had weathered a dozen summers, Fifties-era America was nearing the end of its love affair with conformity, and the fair-haired lad, built like a stick with a nose like a tire iron, had grown surly and indifferent by turns because of an upbringing that alternated between neglect and savage beatings. While his father’s condition slightly improved over time, he remained largely incapable of the little heart-to-hearts with his first born that can mean so much. Instead, he’d mumble or grunt, then violently shake the boy who would howl in pain as harsh topiary lessons increasingly became the focus of his life.

Boslegovich thought she would die laughing when rumors of this abuse reached her office. And she was genuinely sorry to see it end a few weeks before the young man’s eighteenth birthday when a registered letter sent him “Greetings” from the President of the United States and Donny’s family put him on a chrome-sided Greyhound, bound for the deep South, along with other Army inductees. “Don’t come back,” his mother pleaded. “Don’t give him the satisfaction.” Her son gave her a broken little smile and she knew in her heart somehow that he’d be safe.

Having snatched her boy from a fate worse than death, Noreen decided not to rock boats in the saltbox home that was finally up to code. Harry, meanwhile, who would never see Donny again, accepted this setback for what it was, but couldn’t figure out why the plants on his estate remained stubbornly dwarfed (it was because Noreen snuck out at night every two weeks to dock them) and began haunting the local high school’s parking lot looking for a suitable replacement for Donny with a distant look in his eyes and matching pairs of sharpened hedge clippers in a canvas carry bag.

Meanwhile, men carrying live ammo cleared Donny to enter Alabama’s Fort McClellan, where his first months in uniform were totally uneventful. Things livened up a few weeks before his hitch was up after Private Damon, “Dis-MISSED!” from parade, somehow managed to march straight into a telephone pole that was hard as a rock. This misadventure smashed three teeth, cracked six others and drove wooden splinters sharp as porcupine quills deep across his chin, lips, nose and lower forehead. Deadening his pain with expired anesthetics, the camp dentist cleared Donny’s facial forest before capping his damaged choppers, then sent him back to his squad “good as new.”

His troubles began after Damon stormed the mess hall next day craving fruit salad. The famished grunt had no way of knowing that this gloppy sweet treat arrived in five-gallon drums or that they had been opened with considerably less than military precision. He just loaded enough of the stuff on his tray to satisfy an entire platoon and walked back to barracks where he soon got way more than he’d bargained for.

Tiny metal shards (technically “flange,” several micro-centimeters long) had somehow dropped into the opened cans and lay camouflaged in the salad’s syrupy mix of peach, pear, and pineapple chunks, grapes, and Red number 4-dyed cherries. This dangerous razor-sharp debris made no impression whatever on Donny when it burrowed into his gums and, reaching critical mass, fused as he chewed with dental work less than 24 hours old.

What happened next would become urban legend. You couldn’t say Donny fully understood that his teeth were on the fritz, but he did become aware, sometime after sunset, of a slight, strangely comforting ringing in the ears, when the overdose of sugar he’d consumed kept him close to the latrine. “It’ll pass,” he decided but would be proved cruelly wrong.

“Vigah” was the first word Damon’s dental work received, a cryptic message that came in loud and clear between bursts of static. “Q-ber (something or other)” quickly followed and after a short lull, during which shuffling papers could be clearly heard, a broken chorus of competing advice, Ivy League epithets and preliminary TOP SECRET reports broke loose in Donny’s head.

Its effects were initially hard to gauge, since no clarification regarding its origins was forthcoming, save a random clink of ice cubes, something exquisite being poured into Waterford crystal and, off to the side, a belch reserved for the chronically dyspeptic (Secretary of State Dean Rusk seemed the most likely culprit). Then came a swift return to center stage (“Yes, Mr. President.”) and the haunting squeak of a patrician rocking chair, beating time for this flashpoint of history like a slow, one-minute-to-midnight metronome.

Flattered by this perverse command performance, Donny listened hard as Camelot’s chief executive spoke to his crisis team at considerable length, the Kennedy wit nowhere in evidence, once he had decided yet again never to negotiate from fear. Here was a somber cornered president (light years from Hyannis touch football) at the nation’s helm on a fateful Tuesday (October 16, 1962). The man’s back was killing him, but he was nevertheless staying the course for world peace. He knew an atomic brick wall when he saw one yet warned his assembled Cabinet and advisors to get their departments in gear and block delivery of these (such-and-such and so-and-so) Cuba-bound Russian missiles or else he’d “fucking find someone who can!”

Secret White House microphones, feeding even more secret tape recorders, were JFK’s chosen methods of preserving history that he’d eventually use to write his memoirs after leaving office. But despite Jack and his brother Bobby’s predilection for secrecy, the possibility that these cutting-edge machines might somehow malfunction and broadcast administration secrets never occurred to America’s youngest, first-ever Catholic chief executive. Nor did the thought pass through the addled brain of a certain sore-jawed soldier in the great state of Alabama.

Drained by the sticky heat of a miserable Army barracks, Kennedy’s power as commander-in-chief, combined with freak atmospherics and a billion-to-one chance of reception on a dental short-wave set, placed JFK’s innermost thoughts inside Damon’s head for the next thirteen sleepless days and nights. This made it abundantly clear, if ridiculously incorrect, that the president was personally reaching out to the increasingly exhausted soldier during this moment of global crisis.

Donny’s classified, ringside seat for debates that decided the fate of the world seemed an awesome responsibility to the young man. But it also helped him feel connected and important, awaiting orders from his president, for the first time in his life.

Kennedy wanted to keep this business with the Cubans and their Soviet backers very hush-hush. Meeting in near-continuous secret session, the leader of the free world and his advisors soon hashed out a response plan centered on a blockade or “quarantine” strategy and, putting its military might where its mouth was, parked his photogenic self before a curtain of TV cameras inside the Oval Office, ready to go public with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The president made his announcement about the nuclear threat discovered in this hemisphere on Sunday, October 20, 1962. For most Americans, the realization that they were only ninety miles away from vaporization was a sobering introduction to “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Fort McClellan’s troopers meanwhile were already far ahead of this curve, having flown to a Gulf Coast embarkation point the day before, where they prepared for an invasion that would never come.

The spirit of these troops ran high at first as if already victorious in battle. But as the crisis dragged on, from days to a terrifying week and beyond, the untried warriors were dressed in full combat gear, fried by the sun with nothing to do but hurry up and wait, relieve themselves in the sand and be eaten alive by verminous insects known as “chiggers” that dive-bombed their faces and ears with a terrifying Stuka whine of wings.

Some of the soldiers used hands or fly swatters improvised from beachgrass to wave off the attacks or slapped themselves wherever these buzz-bombers touched down. But after presidential broadcasts on his molars had kept him awake for nearly eleven days, Private Damon’s reaction was far more extreme when one of the suckers flew up his nose. He was trying to quench his thirst at the time and, without hesitation, smashed his G.I. canteen hard into his face, crumpling its thin metal and reconfiguring his dental work so that its radio connection with JFK was immediately terminated.

As it turned out, the American president played his cards perfectly—the U.S. blockade of Cuba held. Most of the Russian freighters and their deadly ballistic cargos reversed course while the handful that steamed on toward their destination remained far from Castro’s island fortress. “Wait and see,” had been Kennedy’s watchword, with the U.S. invasion of her southern neighbor tabled until Khrushchev either caved or came out fighting.

A stone’s throw from the transports that would fly them to Cuba, the battle-ready boys on the beach maintained their pre-invasion posture through October 28, when the Russian leader’s sabbath cable reached the White House. That communication accepted JFKs swap of Russian first-strike weapons in the Caribbean for American missiles based in Turkey, effectively bringing tensions between the superpowers to a close and triggering a collective sigh of relief around the world.

When his Army hitch came to its scheduled close two weeks later, men carrying live ammo watched as the now demobilized soldier heeded a last call for “All aboard!” They listened as a powerful diesel engine rasped its gears and inched forward into an anonymous Dixie landscape that first slid then swept by the sweating clay-streaked Greyhound windows bound for points North.

Donny enjoyed the passing scene—hairpin turns through Appalachia; tunnels under the Chesapeake; a seemingly mile-high bridge in Delaware—like a kid on a pony ride. Having lost his front-row seat for the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was uncertain why the president had stopped confiding in him but felt confident his commander-in-chief soon would pick up where they’d left off and make him the focal point of some important future operation.

Misguided as these fantasies were, Damon’s high spirits shone like a beacon on that long-distance transport of lost souls, inevitably drawing unwanted attention to his youthful person. And indeed next day, midday, he heard "Mum’s the word!” at the south Jersey line.

A striking middle-aged gent had made his way up the aisle and loomed directly above him. Weighing at least 300 pounds, probably closer to 350, he wore a sky-blue plus-size “Mogambo”-style safari jacket that, even without any medals or other military decorations attached, looked like it might have been lifted from Hermann Goering’s wardrobe. He pushed a small silver flask into Damon's face and parked his enormous hams on the seats nearby. “Mind if I sit?”

“Help yourself,” Donny replied and thanked the stranger as he rolled up his sleeves and took a swig of some of the rawest whiskey on God’s green earth.

“Ain’t that somethin’?” This was putting it mildly, since the offered refreshment spasmed Damon’s chest, exhausting his air supply. “Tater’s the name,” the tubby visitor announced, like he was batting clean-up in a major league lineup. “Andy Tater. Friends call me ‘Spud’.”

Damon shook hands with what could easily have been a human Test-Ur-Strength machine.

“Thirty years in the book trade!” This wealth of experience had taught him “more than a thing or two or three” about human nature. “I’d bet my life you’re fresh out of the service. Am I right?”

This reminded Donny of his mom’s parting words, “Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

“Felt the same way myself after I did my bit overseas. Battle of the Bulge,” he smiled, never hesitant to tell a joke at his own expense. “Boy, was I lucky! Ran into an Army buddy. Gave me a job and place to stay until I got on my feet.

“And look at me now!” he boasted, offering Donny another pull that made his hair hurt. “Successful as all get-out and happy to recruit ex-grunts like you for my outfit of happy warriors.”

Words like “recruit,” “outfit” and “warriors” made Damon think Tater might have been sent by the president to bring him back, off the road, into covert operations. Before he could nail this down, Spud polished off the last of the firewater and he began singing his own praises, raising himself level with the Greyhound’s luggage racks and thumping his chest with a beefy hand. “Fact is, I’ve helped lots of young men get their lives on track—happy to do the same for you, my friend! What do you say?”

“Ain’t that somethin’?” Tater asked, pointing through the grimy windows as the intercity diesel made its final turn on Route 495, a concrete whirlpool that sucked the bus through Weehawken, down and around a long looping ramp into the gaping maw of the Lincoln Tunnel. Manhattan’s river-front curtain of glass, brick and steel put a haunting face on an otherwise drab early winter afternoon. “I mean,” Tater insisted, “just look at that!”

Donny would have agreed if the alcohol he couldn’t handle hadn’t brought on a serious case of dry heaves. No matter. They were already under the Hudson, nearing their last stop.

The transport’s more impatient passengers began choking the aisle. Hauling down oversized luggage from the overhead racks, some in 30-gallon Hefty bags. Fighting their way into coats, hats and scarves, they thought nothing of dropping a trash-filled sack or heavy suitcase on travelers next to them. One couple seemed in no hurry. Stationed on the edge of the aisle’s human log jam, they patiently waiting their turn to disembark.

“Pushy Yids. . .” Tater declared. A clutch call, but one he was happy to make before rearing up on a pair of thick-soled brogues, grabbing a still-nauseous Damon and his own twin Samsonite clamshell cases and bulldozing across Port Authority Terminal into the downtown Eighth Avenue subway. He assured his newest employee every step of the way that, while the job he’d just accepted wouldn’t earn him much money, “at least you’ll have the privilege of working with books!”

WAKING UP WAS HARD to do and took place hours later in a depressing Manhattan SRO, located at the corner of 25th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The young man’s hangover felt wicked enough to reach out and touch. Given that foggy vibe, he wasn’t much surprised to discover what appeared to be a dyed-in-the-wool goblin sitting next to his bed when his eyes finally opened. “Rise and shine!” the creature commanded in an otherworldly metallic hum of a voice and stuck a Little Debbie Zebra Cake Roll into Damon’s mouth that tasted way past its “Best by” date. “Haul your ass upstairs,” the creature squealed, getting to its feet. “We shove off in 20 minutes!”

As it rose, the battered man, who turned out not to be a goblin after all, lowered the artificial electrolarynx voice box from his chin that allowed for speech and made everything he said sound like race track calls broadcast over a kicked-in loudspeaker. This gave Donny a clear view of the blinding yellow tracheotomy tube stuck in his throat, the Greek Orthodox crucifix hanging from his neck and, as he left the room, the ring of spotty Larry Fein hair circling the top of his head and the high-wattage blue Hawaiian shirt spread across his back.

This grotesque Ed Wynn-lookalike, called “Tinkerbell” behind his back amid a chorus of snickers, had once been handsome indeed and as chock full of promise as the day is long. He ventured into New York in 1951 to land a higher-paying job in accountancy and enjoy a lower profile in a city far bigger than Philadelphia. Both would allow him to enjoy the beatnik coffee shops, poetry readings, nightclubs and galleries his family didn’t approve of and pursue on-again/off-again relationships with devastatingly handsome guys like Andy Tater.

He savored the fruits of these carryings-on according to plan until a wolfpack of faggot-bashing Jersey schoolboys caught him too far off base from his safe havens, decided he was too well-dressed not to be queer and chased him down an alley where they cornered, kicked, beat and antenna-whipped the young man to within an inch of his life.

Only superhuman efforts from the ER team at Greenwich Village’s St. Vincent’s Hospital saved him from departing for the world beyond. When he made it back to the other side, he would never look or feel the same again. This took a heavy toll on his friends and lovers, most of whom didn’t care to be reminded of how fleeting their looks could be or how tragically vulnerable they were fated to remain.

But you had to hand it to Andy Tater. Even though he and the victim of the brutal attack hadn’t been that close, he always showed up for visiting hours. And when his employer fired Tinkerbell after he’d been outed, Spud didn’t miss a beat. He stepped up and asked him to manage the Hotel Fitzgerald, a 40-room fleabag he owned and where he housed the burnt-out hustlers, drifters, crazies at the end of their rope or, sometimes, just shaggy dogs like Damon that he’d picked up on a hunch, and who together formed the unlikely engine driving his company’s success.

Donny must have dawdled. When Tinkerbell returned from his basement efficiency apartment, where he’d downed a blend of instant coffee and predigested protein and freshened up the old trach with a twirl of pipe cleaners, a rap on his door and the twist of a passkey herded Donny into a corridor where his downcast neighbor/colleagues were assembled outside their airless rooms coughing phlegm, then press-ganged into a vintage yellow school bus that had been parked curbside overnight with phony tags and plates.

This 40-foot rust bucket sagged along its chassis and would have been easier to start if it hadn’t been too heavy to push. Underway, it swerved in traffic. Tinkerbell took his passengers’ minds off this danger by having them sing

O the wheels on the bus go

‘Round and ‘round!

at the top of their lungs as they headed downtown. Even with that distraction, their morning drives were white-knuckle affairs until they’d hung a left south of Chambers Street, ending their journey across from City Hall in front of a wide-bottomed six-story red sandstone building that was home to “Hot Potato Books” whose unique trademark, a steaming baked Idaho (featuring live steam) topped with impasto-enameled sour cream and chives, had endeared itself to budget-conscious readers citywide and announced itself to the downtown world in yard-high letters.

The surrounding area had been the city’s Newspaper Row during the glory days of Pulitzer and Hearst. Eight-plus decades of decline later, this warehouse of publishers’ overstocks and remaindered titles was one of Park Row’s most flourishing enterprises, providing a flowing river of inventory to eight highly successful Hot Potato bookstores, spread across Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens, as well as five additional branches making their mark in cities north to Boston.

“Last stop, boys!” Tinkerbell called. Rolling his charges off their seats and reaching into pillowcases stuffed with expired Little Debbies (“Eat one for breakfast/save one for lunch!”), as he reminded them that the water coolers inside they’d be using to wash down these treats featured New York City water—“The best in the world!”

Andy Tater, meanwhile, resplendent on the depository steps in a tent-sized madras sport coat, waved to his long-time chum (who honked through a departing exhaust cloud to leave the bus in a nearby alley) and gave a benevolent “Hiya, kid!” to each of his incoming troops, like Babe Ruth or Father Christmas.

New talent that he was, Donny received an especially warm welcome from the big guy and was handed off to the warehouse foreman with a reminder he be given that special sixth-floor assignment they’d discussed. This was further evidence to Damon that his new gig might well be the secret government mission he was expecting from his good pal, President Kennedy. He would have his answer soon enough.

The building’s ground floor took delivery of sales duds and castoffs that Spud picked up on the cheap from publishers nationwide. Before shipping them to his stores as “New Arrivals,” these treasures were sorted by category, routed upstairs and had self-adhesive labels stuck to their covers:

Whenever he bragged about this “pyramid structure,” the oversized remainder monger would explain how Hot Potato best-sellers received the smallest discounts from list price and were handled on the lowest-numbered stock floor by the largest percentage of his workforce. Nobody much cared about this system of Spud’s, which he termed “innovative,” but it did mean that when the freight elevator arrived at the sixth floor, foreman Gordy Beauchamp could show Donny around an immense silent space, whose windows looked out onto Centre Street and Broadway. Its dusty floors were crammed shoulder-high with cardboard boxes containing slim volumes of unpromising first excursions into verse, oversized collections of fourth-tier poets and weighty tomes on obscure topics that scholars had wasted their bulk of their lives researching.

Damon took it on faith that this immense print desert, where nothing had a prayer of selling without a whopping discount, had something in it for him. The only worker Spud assigned to these titles went about his business with a will and twisted way, sticking an endless supply of one-inch self-adhesive white dots onto a bottomless inventory of useless books without ever receiving any shout out or instructions from the White House.

Box followed box on the sixth-floor, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. Donny’s confidence in his presidential connection remained high for a surprisingly long period of time. But when it inevitably faded, his faith that next day or the day after would bring the gift of JFK also dimmed, on the ride home in Tinker’s rattletrap and after lights out at the Fitzgerald, in his miserable room paid for by bored exhaustion.

Meals, laundry and transportation costs were deducted from residents’ paychecks. This left them roughly eight bucks and change in weekly splurge money, which they could spend any way they chose. But only on their one day off, Sunday, and only between the hours of one and six p.m., when they were allowed off the premises five blocks in any direction, ten if they followed a buddy system (and had carefully negotiating the endlessly renewed sidewalk turd minefield laid down by the service animal academy up the block), and only after they’d sat through the Christian broadcasts that were Tater’s required morning viewing in the hotel’s TV lounge.

Most of his co-workers took advantage of these opportunities to briefly feel human, stretching out on sunny Madison Square Park benches, peering in at the local titty bar’s camera obscura windows or enjoying cheap beer and burgers at the Irish pub across the street, a welcome change from the dented cans of no-name soup and chili that Spud supplied for supper and explained were equally nutritious consumed heated or cold.

In contrast, Damon chose a lonely path of self-denial, discipline and saving his meagre take-home pay, and when his patience with JFK finally snapped, he took 50 cents from that tiny nest egg, paid a quarter for a nickel color postcard showing New York landmarks at “Flatiron Never-Close News and Cigar,” a dime for a 2-cent stamp, then penned a message to our nation’s chief executive:

Mr. President,

Pls call me.

Yr friend,

Donny

He closed by listing his home and office phones. Somehow keeping his rage in check when he dropped this cry for help in the mail, Donny returned to work convinced its plea would turn things around for him down in D.C. Would that it had. But such acts of desperation rarely have the power to extend one-sided affairs. And even on those rare occasions when they do, not for long.

Damon passed the weeks that followed in his sixth-floor lair affixing white dots and watching municipal parades as they made their way up lower Broadway’s “Canyon of Heroes,” where American greats had been fêted for decades. On a steamy July Sunday, while bottle caps buried themselves into the softening pavement on 25^th and Fifth, and with no word whatever from JFK, Donny decided that he had had enough.

He entered Flatiron Never-Close, bought a “New York Times” he didn’t need to keep the owner off his back, changed a $20 bill into quarters and shut the door of the phone booth at the back of the store.

“Is he there?” he asked after someone on the other end picked up and took their sweet time to begin the conversation. “Please,” Donny said, “it’s important. . .”

The gal at the White House switchboard told him, “Just a minute,” put him on hold, then came back and announced she would let him check with brother Bobby. “Thank you, ma’am,” Donny said.

Bobby came on, out of breath from the tennis courts (or was it touch football?), asked the young fellow how he had been, said he was glad to hear it, complained about D.C.’s swampy heat, then told him, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Jack had been there a minute ago, playing with the kids. “Let me go run and see if I can find him.”

All Donny could do was hang tough and, as his funds ran low, shove his foot against the booth door to keep a guide dog and its blind female owner from getting in. Donny felt bad about that, until the line from Washington suddenly came alive again and somebody dropped the receiver with a bang. “Yes?” an impatient, annoyed voice finally said.

“Uh, hello, sir. . .” Donny chose his next words with care. “How ya doin’ there?”

“I’ve already told you, I’m fine,” came the curt reply. Then details about how the discs in his back had been acting up again and how he’d sought relief in the presidential whirlpool. But also how, because of this damn phone call, he found himself standing in the Oval Office, wearing nothing but a towel and dripping water on a deep-pile carpet Great Seal of the United States. “Who’s going to pay for the damage to that, I wonder?” the disembodied voice on the phone demanded.

Donny hadn’t intended to get his commander-in-chief all riled or destroy a priceless treasure that performed double duty as a national symbol. Appalled by how bad a turn things had taken, as well as short on change, Donny asked Jack what he could possibly do to make amends.

“Well, young man,” the president replied, “under the circumstances, I would have to recommend that you, uh, ‘go, uh, fuck yourself!’ With vi-gah!” He hung up without a word of good-bye.

The blind girl and her intelligently disobedient friend were long gone. Donny was left alone to deal with his humiliation, delivered full in the face through the legendary dry Kennedy wit.

Our young man, of course, never considered the possibility that he may have been the victim of a cruel practical joke. With his view obscured by the smudgy glass in the phone booth door and by several hundred miles of distance between Never-Close and our nation’s capital, he couldn’t see the White House switchboard operator doubled over in laughter. Or one of the mansion’s security guards, who’d just happened to be passing when Donny’s call came in and did better-than-average Bobby and Jack impressions (a regular Vaughn Meader). As far as the shattered ex-soldier knew, he’d been thrown to the wolves by the one person who’d given purpose, meaning and hope to his life.

Damon tossed a first shovelful of anger and shame into the brand-new hole these clowns had dug in his soul later that same day, after Never-Close’s owner told him, hey, his store wasn’t a library. One of the ads on “Sporting Life’s” back pages captured his attention. Three weeks and one $19.95 postal money order later (plus shipping and handling), Tinkerbell knocked on the door of his room at the Fitzgerald and wrestled a compact, yet surprisingly heavy parcel inside. “Christ almighty!” the peculiar fellow’s hand mike buzzed. “Whaddaya got in here?” Donny’s reply didn’t extend beyond an unarguable mind-your-own-business sneer.

This same delivery was loaded onto the school bus and Donny took it with him to the Hot Potato warehouse next day. He worked through the morning shift as he normally would and appreciated his sixth-floor privacy more than he ever had before when lunch time rolled around.

His trembling hands stripped away its heavy cardboard cocoon. The walnut stock was the first part of the weapon to emerge, followed by the bolt, breech and trigger, and the cold-forged blue barrel that announced its presence like a silent scream. By any measure it was a honey of a long gun. Just looking at it made Donny shiver. Fondling it, he began to get hard.

Adding to this excitement, he soon discovered that the rifle’s 4x telescopic sight came packed in its own little box as did the 60 rounds of ammunition included with the purchase price. Fitting scope to stock, Donny felt intense pride of ownership as he read the packing slip, which echoed Sporting Life’s generic description of “Army Surplus Bolt-Action Rifle: Italian 6.5 x 52mm.” Quite the lethal mouthful!

He lifted a floorboard, hid his prized possession, fitted with its optional shoulder sling. then stood at the window gazing downtown. Everyone from Lindbergh to Eisenhower and MacArthur plus the Mercury astronauts had had tickertape by the ton bury their motorcades as they inched up lower Broadway past the Standard Oil Building, Trinity Church, St. Paul’s Chapel, and Woolworth’s Cathedral of Commerce. Then they turned right to meet and greet the city’s mayors, who never skimped on pomp and circumstance.

Jack Kennedy had been similarly honored during the 1960 campaign and doubtless would be again during an upcoming election, holiday or Democratic shindig, providing opportunities a-plenty to place a presidential motorcade in Damon’s crosshairs and blast the chief executive double-crosser into history. That would certainly teach him not to mess. The only questions were when that would happen and how the ex-soldier would remain cool until their fateful encounter.

Damon was understandably anxious and humbled by his approaching date with destiny. But rather than exhaust his ammo prematurely, he picked off practice targets as his schedule allowed. Donny would initially take aim and dry-round a couple of office workers while they ate lunch in City Hall Park. This changed when his god’s-eye view revealed that the great metropolis mounted its own mini-celebrations of cops, firefighters and other civil servants.

Focusing his telescopic sight, Donny understood how these folks went above and beyond the call of duty because it was their job. But he could also see how embarrassing official recognition could be for them as these honorees perched on the back seats of convertibles trimmed with bunting and dignitaries from their respective departments, on a drive that only ran three blocks from the Woolworth Building to a plaque presentation and photo op at City Hall.

It was all very moving at first then Donny began to feel hollow as the parades’ dull regularity took its toll, making it almost seem inevitable that, like a New Year’s resolution on borrowed time, half-an-hour before lunch on a surprisingly mild late November Friday, Damon shouldered his weapon and begin tracking the city’s latest motorcade. This procession honored a Queens garbageman who had somehow revived two clinically dead eight-year-olds found in a junked refrigerator. The hero’s wife rode beside him in the open Lincoln, along with the sanitation commissioner and his wife, trailing a refuse workers’ marching band, fronted by baton twirlers in little boots and short shirts. Damon’s crosshairs picked up the wife, darted across the married dignitaries, and finally settled on the broad, toothy face of the day’s honoree.

It would have been a difficult shot to bring off—a moving target past a hundred yards out, with mature oaks clouding his scope—not even taking aim from a crouch. On top of which, an odd vibration now pulsed through the building as its freight elevator struggled to reach the top floor. Nevertheless, his military training and perhaps many months of accumulated impatience, seemed to get the better of him that day. Donny chambered a clip of live rounds in his weapon, held his breath, sighted, squeezed the trigger, blurred the bolt, and got off three aimed shots in less than six seconds.

The blasts echoed around City Hall for what seemed like an eternity. Choking on discharge from his supposedly smokeless cartridges, the shooter saw the motorcade he’d targeted stop in its tracks while the sanitation worker he’d done his best to kill was still waving at the crowd. His head, inexplicably, remained an unexploded mass of blood, bone and tissue.

Adding insult to non-injury, Donny sensing a hum behind him, turned and saw Tinkerbell stumble forward from the elevator. “Jesus Christ, Damon!” he hollered, the electronic feedback in his voice a mixture of outrage and disappointment. “You pick today of all days to pull a stunt like this? Give me that damn thing!” he ordered, insisting he surrender his weapon, which Tinkerbell dispatched down a narrow, sunless airshaft, exiting through the floor’s men’s room window, where it caught in the brickwork, three floors down, as if dragged by a whirlpool to the bottom of the sea. The spent shell casings immediately followed. “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” was his valediction on that subject before turning forcefully and saying, “C’mon, let’s go! We’re already late!”

The pair took the elevator to the ground floor where an emergency meeting called by Tater was getting underway. Spud himself stood on a stack of wooden pallets piled dangerously high so all his guys could see him. “Everybody’s here?” He raised a huge hand for silence as a shrill metallic “Shhhh!” ripped through the room, then made the announcement that would open the floodgates of trauma across the nation and around the world. “President Kennedy has been shot. . .”

“In Dallas,” Tater told them, “half an hour ago. God only knows if the leader of our great nation has been wounded or much worse. But whatever His will, I’m shutting the place down early today. Let’s all go home and pray this good man’s life will be spared.” With that, Spud raised his hand in solemn benediction. The only difference between his early dismissal and the close of a church service was the absence of organ music as the warehousemen filed out through Hot Potato’s Beekman Street exit.

Tinkerbell brought the school bus around. Most everyone took their seats for the return trip to the Fitzgerald. Donny, however, was pissed off. Someone had managed to beat him to the punch at his deadly game. He signaled to Tinkerbell that he’d be along later. There was something in the neighborhood he needed to clear up first.

“o THEOS mazi sas!” electronically whined his way before the yellow-colored clunker shut its doors, setting a course north by northeast, while the failed shooter made his way onto Park Row and, from there, into City Hall Park where the adoring parade crowd of an hour ago had dwindled to practically nothing. Those few who remained were huddled around transistor radios.

Donny checked where he had aimed, finding the curbstone where his first shot had vaporized. A similar blast mark appeared on a paving stone dating from Boss Tweed times, in a setting of Broadway asphalt. Broken glass in a sidewalk vault light evidenced the third stray bullet. All of which left Damon in little doubt that he’d strayed off target because of a defective gun sight.

To find out, Donny caught the subway north from Park Place and took a front-row seat in front of the vintage Dumont “Club 20” black-and-white console that Tater had donated in the Hotel Fitzgerald’s TV lounge, minutes after his colleagues’ and Tinkerbell’s return. It was just in time to experience the full-throated moan that tore through the room when Walter Cronkite told the nation “President Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. this afternoon, Dallas time.”

Despite his deep-seated grudge, Donny could feel his own heart tearing in half as well.

“Shots were fired at the presidential motorcade as it entered Dealey Plaza.”

“Law enforcement officials have retrieved the murder weapon, along with three spent cartridges.”

“Police say the assassin was aiming from an open sixth-floor window of the Dallas School Book Depository Building.”

“Governor Connally is listed in satisfactory condition at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital.”

“The two young Kennedy children have yet to be informed of the tragedy.” “Lyndon Johnson, our nation’s thirty-sixth President, was sworn into office on Air Force One while Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Kennedy and the slain president’s staff looked on.”

“The President's body will lie in state at the White House tomorrow and at the Capitol Rotunda Sunday. Funeral services to be attended by world leaders are planned for Monday, November 25th. We will be covering all of that live, of course.”

“Air Force One, carrying the presidential party back from Texas, will touch down in Washington at approximately 5:30 p.m., Eastern ti-. . . One moment, please, ladies and gentlemen.” He jerked a finger to his wired ear. “We’ve just received word that Dallas Police have apprehended a suspect. . . The alleged assassin’s name FFFFFFFFFF. . .”

“We’re back, I think. I’ll repeat that last item. Dallas Police now have a suspect in custody who’s charged with murdering both President Kennedy and an off-duty Dallas patrolman named J.D. Tippit. He has been tentatively identified as a Lee Harvey Oswald, 24 years old. A white man, employed as a clerk at the Texas School Book Depository.”

“That’s the building, you’ll remember, from which the fatal shots were fired.” “The recovered murder weapon, an Italian-made bolt-action Army rifle, has been traced to Oswald through mail-order purchase records.”

"Hang the son of a bitch," a Hot Potato worker shouted, echoing Donny’s sentiments exactly.

“Oswald,” Cronkite added, “is currently undergoing intensive interrogation by the FBI and Dallas Police. As we’ve said, Oswald has categorically denied any involvement in these shootings. But authorities say they have a large amount of circumstantial evidence tying him to the killings.”

Hot Potato’s other workers had called it a night when the latest Crime of the Century’s suspect was finally paraded before the cameras: a bruised, squirrel-faced man, three-quarters drowned in a sea of cops and reporters, whose only oxygen at this point seemed to be arrogance. “I don’t know what this is all about,” he claimed. “I don’t know nothing about shootin’ the President. They’re taking me in because I lived in the Soviet Union. I’m just a patsy!”

It took Donny a moment to realize he was being spoken to before he nodded and said, “Ah, thanks, um. . .” without going any further.

“‘Basil,’” Tinkerbell’s hand mike whined, before he kissed the Greek cross hanging from his neck. “My name’s ‘Basil.’ Vasilis Karabatsou.”

The younger man smiled an embarrassed late greeting and inhaled his evening can of unheated chili as the pair began watching the tube’s fifteen-hour coverage of a flag-draped casket, positioned on a White House East Room catafalque ringed by circling Capital mourners. Like so many millions of other Americans, both men had committed to watching the ghostly images non-stop until President Kennedy’s remains were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The televised wake seemed to go on forever. Hardening the fact of Jack’s violent passing and the assassination’s boatload of parallels to his own failed attempt, Donny perked up with Sunday’s arrival, when the screen’s scene shifted after police down in Dallas decided it might be a good idea to move Oswald from his present digs to a heightened security setting.

The TV set’s mouse-gray eye opened onto an impressive sweep of 10-gallon hats milling around the Dallas City Jail garage, waiting to whisk their charge from freight elevator to armored paddy wagon. The announcer, killing time, waxed far too poetic on Texas girls, Texas food and Texas weather, but Donny, with his vested interest intact, remained patient and soon saw the shooter who had done him one better when it really counted.

Lee looked fit to be tied, surrounded by popping flashbulbs. Unshaven, he wore a dark sweatshirt with lighter colored pants, and was handcuffed at the wrist to a bull in a blinding Kentucky Colonel outfit, the material in his suit jacket glowing like phosphorous (“Little Debbies?” Basil queried.), with the trousers less so. As the awkward procession took yet another breather, Damon could almost feel the manacles tearing Oswald’s wrists. The suspected assassin’s lungs were parched from engine fumes trapped in the underground chamber. When the cordon of spectators dispersed as suddenly as it had formed, Donny could honestly say he felt like a third wheel to the two men, captor and captive, as they moved across the floor at a pretty good clip. Until a bulbous blur of retribution rushed in from nowhere, back to the camera, and plugged the suspect dead-center.

Oswald was headed to the morgue after a short stop at Parkland. While Damon, now that justice seemed complete, found himself unmoved even uncertain of where he stood in the assassination’s great scheme of things. “Always a bridesmaid” seemed to sum it up nicely.

When the funeral’s ceremonies finally concluded, and “Taps” had been played at the presidential gravesite, and Jackie clutched a folded flag from a grateful nation, the networks’ regular programming quietly resumed.

Donny returned to the sixth floor of Hot Potato headquarters where he struggled to find his place in the nation’s post-Camelot world.

WHENEVER FAMILY MEMBERS are unfortunate enough to die in an accident, their next-of-kin often fantasize about how it might have been avoided, like making the departed start their trip an hour sooner or later, choosing a different destination, driving instead of flying, maybe something as simple as having that second cup of coffee. Even so, most of us find peace after our loved ones are laid to rest.

But when it was broadcast that “FBI officials believe a conspiracy was involved in the President’s assassination” hours before Lee Harvey Oswald was even arrested, with years of paranoid theories to follow, healing became impossible for a large segment of the U.S. population.

The mourning process for these lost souls just never ended. Years or even decades later, JFK’s murder felt like it had happened yesterday and remained as much an open wound as the loss of a father, husband, brother or son.

With the pain of bereavement never receding, some people bought in to the fantasy of somehow being able to stop the murder in Dallas. When that method of coping no longer served, an unluckier few opted for the greater madness of believing they had somehow been involved in these fatal conspiracies. Better that, ego demanded, than admit to being totally irrelevant to the signature event of their lives and generation.

Donny Damon shouldn’t have been surprised to find a resemblance between his own mug and Oswald’s. Thousands of traumatized U.S. citizens would entertain the same weird fantasy over the years and down the decades. But he had stronger reasons than most to believe that authorities could make an open and shut case given the astonishing similarities on November 22, 1963, between the sixth floors in Dallas and at Hot Potato Books, provided they could track him down.

He kept his ears to the ground to keep tabs on their progress. He watched the network news each night with Tinkerbell, thumbed through local press stories at Flatiron Never-Close (“Hey, pal! This ain’t no library!”), or in the scandal sheets at grocery store checkout lines (“Hey, pal! You gonna buy that or what?), as well as consulting the remaindered conspiracy theory titles that played an increasingly large part in Hot Potato’s inventory.

Never a slouch, Donny stuck with this program of self-enlightenment for five years, when Andy Tater passed from cancer, joking that he’d “finally gone on that diet.” For ten years, when Hot Potato was no longer turning a profit and had to be sold. Loyal to his staff, Basil “Tinkerbell” Karabatsou continued housing them at the Fitzgerald and driving them to new jobs as unlicensed asbestos removers every day in the school bus. And finally into the Ford and Carter Administrations, presiding over the disco era, after Basil scrapped the bus, and all the workers except Damon departed the Fitzgerald with early onset mesothelioma.

Upriver in Carvéd Hedge, meanwhile, a largely senile Harry Damon, nearing 90, pottered around his estate and, absurdly, still believed Bev Boslegovich’s wild yarn about restoring his property’s bushes, trees, and shrubs to their made-up topiary glory. Except for a male nurse, Harry had lived alone for years, an arrangement that began after his better half Noreen downed one too many G&Ts at a Howard Johnson’s near the Tappan Zee Bridge then steered into oncoming traffic driving home. It was this paid help rather than a family member who discovered during his call for breakfast that Harry had died peacefully in his sleep the night before with a rusty pair of hedge clippers hidden in his bedsheets.

Since no one had told him about his dear old dad, Donny was unable to attend the funeral and probably wouldn’t have gone to it even if he’d known. But all things considered, Harry’s death couldn’t have come at a better time. The miracle of re-zoning, paired with a shortage of shopping mall sites in and around Carvéd Hedge, meant his son and sole heir received an after-tax inheritance of $6.7 million under provisions of a will that hadn’t been revised since 1960. That legal declaration surfaced shortly after Tinkerbell and Damon had begun collecting bottles and cans for the nickel each deposit. “Gold in our streets,” they’d called it.

Donny believed the sudden windfall would somehow help authorities to arrest him for what he believed was his role in a still-unspecified JFK murder conspiracy. He thought this was only fair given his Hot Potato hijinks, as well as long overdue, since it dropped into his lap nearly a decade-and-a-half after the fatal day.

Damon’s first step toward achieving this goal was to ask Tinkerbell, formerly an up-and-coming accountant at Sheffield, Blaine & Drew, to serve as his general factotum and business manager. Then he purchased a dilapidated two-story building near the Fitzgerald that he’d long had his eye on. Short on charm and with a down-at-heel topless establishment called “Fillies” as its main draw, the property was sandwiched in-between a laundry and a church and went for a song.

The moment Damon got the keys, out went the half-naked girls and in came his demolition crew, carpenters, electricians and plasterers. The new owner then went his merry way, arranging for the liquor license and fixtures, buying furniture and lining up whatever else Tinkerbell said they’d need to run a successful bar and nightclub. The only things left to do before opening night were to finalize the hotspot’s inside décor and its signature outside sign. Damon had definite ideas for both, inspired by a single hand-held source.

Back on a long-ago, sad November day, Russian-born clothing manufacturer and amateur shutterbug Abraham Zapruder had wanted a keepsake of President Kennedy’s Dallas visit to share with his grandkids. The newspapers said the president’s route to the Trade Mart, where a lunchtime speech was scheduled, would run through Dealey Plaza, a stone’s throw from his office, so Abe grabbed his secretary, along with a wind-up Bell & Howell camera, and crossed the Plaza to Elm Street, looking for a great spot to film the president’s motorcade. It was a few minutes before 12:30 p.m. local time.

A short concrete abutment in front of a grassy knoll seemed tailor-made for the purpose. Once he’d managed to climb it, Abe was happy he’d brought Marilyn Sitzman along. And she was more than happy to hold the back of his jacket from below. Abe suffered from vertigo. God forbid he should fall.

The co-workers’ excitement grew as cheers from the crowd, along with a sprinkling of boos from around the corner of Houston, told them they wouldn’t have long to wait. As promised, the impressive motorcade soon came into view. When the presidential limo slowed to a crawl then turned right on Elm, Abe peered through his viewfinder and began filming the most important visual document of the 20th century, in 8mm Kodachrome II safety stock, only moments before Nellie Connally turned to JFK and laughingly told him, “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you!”

The total running time for the sequence Mr. Zapruder captured that day is a brief 26.6 seconds and involves only 484 frames of exposed film. Yet that short span allowed the assassination to be viewed start-to-finish around the world, while the film’s miniaturized format seemed curiously aligned with the thoughts of an English poet who’d lived a century and a half before:

Every space small than a globule of

Man’s blood opens into Eternity

For the majority of Americans, the fleeting sequence Zapruder captured really can feel like an eternity, whether it’s being viewed for the first, second, third or even for the hundredth time.

Start the clock on Oswald’s first missed shot from the sixth-floor Texas School Book Depository window.

Advance to the second round, which tore through the President’s throat (he’s seen reacting to the wound in frame 225) and also inflicted serious wounds on Texas Governor John Connally.

Frame 313’s “kill shot,” where the right side of Kennedy’s head explodes in a mist of blood, bone and cranial matter, follows closely.

“They have killed my husband,” Mrs. Kennedy said, “I have his brains in my hand.” She’d sought help from the Secret Service and was crawling across the rear of the limo, returning to her gore-drenched seat.

These words and images shocked America and triggered an open-ended period of grief in which the film, and a string of increasingly ridiculous questions it could supposedly answer, endured.

Abe Zapruder made it clear he believed this last shot had been fired from behind where he’d stood, perhaps somewhere up on the Plaza’s grassy knoll. This seemed to open a door that the FBI walked through, grabbing and holding Donny’s attention when the Bureau announced it was investigating the possibility that Oswald had acted as part of a conspiracy.

Given that cultural history and Donny’s unique past, it kind of made sense, in a twisted sort of way, that when he visited “Superior Lithography” to chat with owner Ron della Ladro about decorating his club’s interior, he’d be carrying the well-thumbed copy of LIFE that he’d first laid eyes on at Flatiron Never-Close one short week after JFK’s murder. It included a shockingly explicit eight-page spread that shared Abe Zapruder’s violent Dallas chronicle with America. Damon calmly walked Ron through each of the film’s gut-wrenching frames, telling him which ones he wanted della Ladro to turn into oversized blowups, as well as how he’d like to have them laminated, spot-lit and hung on the walls of his nightclub.

Now that old man Damon’s money had put his dramatically narrowed focus into action, Donny also relied on Zapruder’s camera for inspiration when he sat down with Brad Litofsky at his “Signs of the Times” studio and explained, "I want something in neon, really big! Thirty feet high or more if that’s possible." Brad’s people had been crafting their tacky glow-worm advertisements for more than three decades, so fabricating a piece that size wouldn’t be a problem. The only catch was, Brad had no clue what his client was asking for. “Yeah, sure, we can make it. But what’s an ‘Umbrella Man’? Just some guy dancin’ in the rain?”

“Far from it,” Damon would clarify. What he specifically meant was a 30+ foot animated neon version of the shadowy out-of-focus figure that Mr. Zapruder had managed to film on that sun-drenched November Dallas morning. The lone individual among the day’s crowd of onlookers who had decided to bring an open umbrella with him. Crazy stuff, right?

As the JFK limousine rolls past this mystery man on Elm Street, he rapidly closes and re-opens his brolly as if signaling “Commence fire!” to a multi-pronged assassination team. Once the fusillade wraps and the motorcade speeds away, other cameras across Dealey Plaza show him permanently stowing the bumbershoot, briefly resting on the sidewalk before getting to his feet, then leisurely strolling away toward the Texas School Book Depository building.

Despite film technicians’ best efforts to bring his features into focus, this unindicted co-conspirator’s face remains stubbornly blurry at all times. As a result, investigators from Dallas and worldwide were forced to conclude that the guy could have been just about anybody. This went a long way toward explaining why Donny took him so much to heart over the years.

At a time when “Studio 54” was raking it in uptown and turning would-be patrons away in droves, opening day downtown at “The Umbrella Man” found Donny’s plain vanilla bar stools and red-check table-clothed seating vacant throughout the afternoon. Serving as chief mixologist and bottle washer, Tinkerbell knew the drill, patiently polishing and re-polishing row upon row of shot glasses, then re-aligning the multi-colored liquor bottles that gave off a magical glow on the lighted bar under Governor Connally’s friendly, varnished motorcade wave.

As darkness arrived, Donny swore he could feel electricity in the air, despite strong evidence to the contrary. Calling Tinkerbell aside, he explained one more needless time how the switch for the enormous sign worked, stepped onto the sidewalk, crossed his fingers, shut his eyes and boomed “Let her rip!” but dared not look up until the odd percolating whine of warming neon tubing told him that his equally enormous outlay had been well spent. For here was a garish neon eyesore worthy of that description, and one to which the city would soon grant expedited landmark status.

The umbrella on the sign alone stood nearly 35 feet high in the evening murk. Toward its base, the bumbershoot’s shaft and curved handle glowed cobalt blue. Nearer the top, the screaming red ribs fluttered open and shut every fifteen seconds, causing the umbrella’s skin to snap taut, spelling out UMBRELLA MAN in green, or go slack and shake out a small galaxy of dripping yellow stars.

“You want to close early?” Rain was coming in and with business going nowhere it was certainly something to consider.

“Close?” Damon's face showed more surprise than pain, much as Jack’s had in Zapruder frame 225, which hung to Donny's immediate left, after the second bullet struck. “Why close? They’ll show, I tell you!”

Donny had no answer. Instead, he moped contently in a window seat near the club entrance, watching its new glowing mascot run through its paces while he waited in vain for police black-and-whites to swoop down and arrest him or for after-theater revelers to tango across his threshold like Ginger and Fred.

Something like fog seemed to be drifting in instead. The owner’s disappointed eyes sought comfort in the cool cinematic haze his neon cast over the street and sidewalk and onto tenement windows a few floors higher just across the way. Tumid little wind puffs snipped around the corners, mixed with thunder so distant you almost didn’t notice. Damon could hear the first fat raindrops hitting the sidewalk, then the few leftover strollers scrambling for cover and heading home at a run. Soon a beaded curtain of rain stood between The Umbrella Man’s owner and the rest of the world. “Maybe just think about closing?”

That was never an option for Donny. He engaged the front door’s doorstop as the barometer plummeted, nursing a short drink and focusing on Zapruder frame number 230, where Jack took the first hit with raised hands. Tinkerbell, meanwhile, continued polishing glassware until, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed what had previously seemed unthinkable. “I think we got company,” he said, loud enough to bring Donny out of his reverie.

A foul pool of water formed at the feet of this late-night caller. Nasty drippings fell from his oversized slouch hat and undersized trench coat, both of which had seen better days. Thick albino wheat crops sprouted from his nostrils. Damon almost wept for joy thinking a plainclothes cop had come to take him in.

“No we’re not, Vasilis!” Donny told him. “Take the gentleman’s order!”

Tinkerbell capped his frustration before it completely blocked his trach and swabbed out that surgical incision in the little muchacho’s room. His departure left Donny alone with his guest, who’d shown up hoping to improve his circumstances. He’d cut out drinks and smokes, and cut back on showers and shaves. Even his cats had been put down in an effort to minimize his operating costs. He set himself up at a distant table where he fished a contact lens from under an eyelid and puffed away like King Farouk on the free old lady Kents that his host kept sending his way.

“Hello, yourself,” came the wheezing reply. Behind him, Zapruder frame number 313 depicted cranial impact. “This for me?” he asked, sampling half of Damon’s proffered double bourbon. A bloody halo ringed Jack’s head, skull fragments flying every which way. With last drops now collecting on that first drink, the host made a second show of generosity. “Don’t mind if I do,” the stranger said. “Siddown.”

"Designed it myself." He then turned the stranger’s head by the chin and pointed impishly to Zapruder 313. “Talk about ridin’ with the top down!”

The guest did a quick 20-20 of the bar’s décor and admitted that The Umbrella Man sure had style to burn. “If you want to lose money,” he told Damon, “this is one sure way to do it.”

The owner of the bar spent the next half hour bringing this visitor guest up to speed about his days in the Army, recruitment by Jack for special assignment, the broken dental short-wave connection, his great migration north, Andy Tater, Tinkerbell, the Hotel Fitzgerald and the president’s unconscionable betrayal, the Hot Potato sniper’s nest gone terribly wrong, the six mirrored seconds in Dallas gone horribly right, the conspiracy theories and 8mm home movie that Damon believed linked the two shooters together, and how The Umbrella Man’s towering neon sign would help investigators pinpoint his location to bring the ex-soldier, former warehouseman and current nightclub owner to justice for his role in an increasingly distant assassination conspiracy.

Donny’s “confession,” if that was the right word to describe it, made almost no impression on the stranger beyond reminding him of speed-prepped first graders talking to Allen Funt. He had listened to similar fever dreams dozens of times before; they were part of his job description, but his nostril wheat crop didn’t recoil in horror during any of Damon’s insane discourse. In fact, their stillness almost killed Donny’s bizarre incarceration fantasies when the stranger squeezed his hand and told him, “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not a cop. Take my advice, though, and in a couple of weeks, you can have cops or anyone else you want, fighting to get in here and paying top dollar!”

“Honest, pal, city cops, FBI, park rangers. Whatever you want! I guarantee they’ll come! Ready to spend! And lock you up whenever you say!”

“Mebbe.” The stranger signaled that his glass had a hole in its bottom and was empty again.

It took Damon a second to catch on, then pour another generous round. He received a slip of paper for his troubles that had once been a business card. Deciphering it was like reading through a fishbowl at a dozen paces. “You’re a what, now?”

“A promoter? You pay me, and I put you and your verkakte nightclub on the front page. You know,” shaking a couple of sugar packets like they were pom-poms. “Rah-rah-rah?”

“GROW-ak,” the flack corrected, applying a half-Nelson buddy-buddy tone that had served him well for three-quarters of his career. A big-deal newspaperman in the ‘40s and ‘50s, he crashed and burned at the beginning of the ‘70s. He’d since gotten by as a gun-for-hire and was damn lucky to still be surviving in a younger man’s game, even if that sometimes meant living off credit cards, like now, for instance, when he was nearly tapped out and Donny’s freebies felt like a lifeline.

Groak let it pass before he smart-mouthed his way out of another gig. “What’s important,” went his closer, “is the experience I can bring to your, uh, team.” (He’d glanced at Tinkerbell.) “You know where you want to go. Just leave it to me to get you there.”

Plans for “Amateur Night” at The Umbrella Man were soon underway. Not much needed to be done, but Groak didn’t see that as a reason to lower his retainer.

Three of the middle tables were moved upstairs so the little stage could be extended and an exposed brick wall installed, years before you saw them everywhere in comedy clubs. A trio of spotlights stood ready at the back to provide some showtime magic. Ten bucks to winos got Groak’s flyers handed out. Donny and Tinker licked stamps for the celebrity invitations. Local media legend Joe Franklin said that he might come. The publicist splurged on klieg lights that would sweep brilliant pillars of fire into the night sky across the street from the club’s entrance. He’d also arranged for honor system nickel beer, hoping this would go over better at the club than that dime beer experiment had at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium.

From the start, though, quality seemed like it might be a big issue for this gala evening. Most of the audience seemed to be hypothermic hookers, looking to stay warm. Street toughs were disproportionately represented. The college boys who showed were snots and alienated guys from the neighborhood when they hit on their girls. One couple came to celebrate their silver anniversary. Somebody brought their pot-bellied pig. The “Lady in Chains,” a flame-haired local legend, flew in with an entourage of bomber-jacket buddies. Strangely, they’d phoned ahead for reservations. When the klieg light operators broke for coffee, Groak, nose hairs aflutter with opening night jitters, directed the evening’s late-arriving talent to the upstairs dressing rooms, then sat ringside and commenced to drink with his pal Donny. Somewhere along the line, someone or other had decided that Tinkerbell would make a swell M.C. And now that freakish unfortunate was about to open the show in all his show-biz glory. Stuffed into a green paisley tuxedo, his open-shirt quietly maroon, he opened with a shrill eclectrolarynx shoutout, “Hey! Good evening, ladies and germs!”

“Hey! Wow! Wow! I’m your host, Vasilis Karabatsou, and are we gonna have some fun tonight or what? And I’m talkin’ acres and acres of Umbrella Man talent!” “Mother of Christ. . .”

A queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach hinted to Groak that all might not go as well this evening as he’d originally hoped and planned.

Tinkerbell died on stage for five minutes that felt like an hour, then turned the stage over to old vaudevillians still alive and running on fumes, up-and-comers who wouldn’t know fumes from hunger, out-of-towners who couldn’t get arrested (“Aww RIGHT!” somebody yelled) and one act that stood out from the rest if only for its unique, unparalleled awfulness.

You could loosely call it a ventriloquist performance. It began mildly enough. A sawed-off little runt in a bow tie, baking in the spotlight, with a face to stop a clock, sat cross-legged on a barstool, not saying a word.

Audience attention seemed to wander or had already waned until the time-honored cry of “FOCUS!” brought them all back. Parts of the crowd were still mildly swelling. A sour pair of newcomers stood cross-armed in the doorway, nodding meaningfully among themselves. Donny knew in his bones they had to be cops. The little one, meanwhile, adjusted his thin friend, Mike Ra-phone. “Hey, what gives? Is this thing on?” Ran a tiny doll’s hand up over his full beard and glistening bald pate. “Whatta scorcher up here, lemme tell ya!” he said, blotting his forehead with Kleenex before the show could go on.

“I’m not kidding!” he shouted back. “It really is HOT under these lights.”

And with that especially hurtful comment, a tiny voice crept out over the Runt’s set of portable speakers. A voice that (“Whah! Lemme outta here! I’m suffocatin’!") in its high silvery mournfulness (“It’s pitch black in here!”) quickly nixed the catcalls. There was no face in sight to go with the voice.

“Listen!” shushed the Runt. And the audience, for once, did as it was told, slowly catching on that this shtick was the heart of the act.

A few coarse titters circled the bar while witnesses in a Zapruder blow-up charged the Grassy Knoll searching for a team of snipers. “But I bet I can find you!” (Hamming things up for the audience.) “Let’s go hunting, shall we?” the Runt asked rhetorically. Slapping the chest pockets on his ultra-suede jacket. Somehow making them pop like bubble wrap blisters. “Not there, huh, little fellah?”

“Oh, ladies and gentlemen. . .” A give-away smile spread across the Runt’s face as his hands landed somewhere the sun shouldn’t shine. After a long expansive moment, he began to unzip. “I know you’re in there, Mr. Chucky.”

“He’s scared,” the Runt giggled, getting in a sly wink. “Don’t you want to meet the nice people?”

“Well, why didn’t you say so!” Chucky sprang from his master’s pants without further ado. Staring straight at them from the bright theatrical light, the audience quickly realized the Runt had gone to unsettling lengths to make his constant companion resemble a ventriloquist’s dummy. Limp little clown legs and feet stuffed into miniature big shoes dangled from the Spam-pink testicles. Happy birthday-party polka dots and tiny arms decorated the surprisingly hefty shaft. Psychotic care had obviously been lavished on the neck ruffles (fancywork on a Van Dyke level) while the Bozo face at the head of his whoozis was a micro-masterpiece of the cosmetician’s art.

“Pardon us, please,” the pair of newcomers said, lazily making their way to the stage.

Runt pointed to the Lady in Chains with his free hand. “Say hello to your new lady friend, Mr. Chucky.”

The puppet shyly shook its head from side to side, and even seemed to blush beneath its heavy coat of greasepaint. “Hel-lo. . . la-dy. . .”

Madame les Chains wouldn’t say a word without being properly introduced. “Pardon us. . .”

The newcomers chose this moment to bounce purposefully onstage. “Hi, there, Chucky!” said the taller of the two, shaking the little play hand.

Donny caught sight of the lawman’s glittering shield and lurched forward. “Hey! Over here!” he called, forgetting he was drunk.

One bull nodded. The other slapped the cuffs on somewhere. “You got a big kiss waiting downtown, fellah.”

They yanked Runt up hard by the armpits, causing Chucky to make an awful mess of himself and of one arresting officer’s two-tone retro footwear. These were absolute beauties that would have made Astaire, Gene Kelly or Donald O’Connor proud. “Asshole!” shot the taller cop, frowning at his desecrated custom wingtips (“Those shoes cost me plenty!”) and wondering where he could score some Kleenex, while Chucky’s performance drew a standing ovation.

Donny stumbled onstage just in time to see the peace officers shove the Runt and Mr. Chucky out the front door (“Pardon us, Miss,” they apologized.) into a waiting police van. The departing siren’s whine seemed to stir up a few loose chicken feathers from the sidewalk outside that drifted, ever so slowly, past the JFK blow-ups, to tickle the nose of the Lady in Chains. Along with her leather boys, she held her ground and had no intention of bailing, despite this break in the talent show action.

“We’ll be back shortly, folks,” the M.C. chirped and asked Groak what he thought their next move should be, as Damon sunk ever deeper into himself.

“Well, don’t ask me!” He was agitated because he’d already blown Damon’s two-month advance on his salary and was completely in the dark about what his next move should be after this dismal first showing. The publicist headed to the Gents to clear his head and bladder and put on the old thinking cap.

The soft voice caught Tinkerbell by surprise. Seeing the astonishing face that went with it, the M.C. found he couldn’t speak. The young woman had to repeat herself until he understood who she wanted to see. “That would be Mr. Damon, Miss. The gent with the gut-ache.” He pointed. “Over there.”

“I see," she called over her shoulder, already past the blow-ups, ringside tables and shallow viscous pool that Chucky had left. The Umbrella Man’s proprietor was sunk in a chair, still close to the stage.

Looking up with eyes that seemed to focus somewhere beyond her, Donny noticed a strong, slim hand wanting to shake his but didn’t have the heart to take her up on the offer. She risked it and felt his fingers in hers flashing hot and cold.

“Mr. Damon,” she said. “My name’s Sadasia Trayne and I’ve come to sing in your place.”