Chapter 43

(Wall Street Plots)

I guess that it would be truthful to stretch a point and say that I was brought up in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. I could see it with my grandfather’s binoculars from the rooftop of our tenement building sitting innocently dwarfed by the hulking Port Authority building with multiple basements hiding secrets still unknown to this day. The “plug-in” trucks of the Railway Express Company dominated the landscape for a full city block. Each day they would venture forth on delivery duties silently moving on the almost two hundred year old streets like ghost ships passing in the night.

Wall Street was down, way down and nestled snugly in the hustling, bustling shelter of commercial buildings and mysterious churches and cemeteries.

History was hidden in the city between two rivers.

Supposedly, Manhattan Island was bought for the sum of twenty-four dollars from ignorant Indian tribes by a bunch of scheming Dutchmen.

Strangely, the Indians considered the unsmiling Dutchmen a bunch of losers because the magical mirrors and the sparkling beads were obviously much more valuable than Mother Earth that was a commodity no human being could possibly own any more than the air that flowed through one’s lungs or the mighty rivers that ran out to the infinite sea.

The Dutchmen felt like masters of the universe pulling the wool over the infant-like Indian’s eyes. They were interested only in a base of operations to make their fortunes in this “New World”.

Their “New Amsterdam” would go down in the history books as the shining light of their colonial country putting them far ahead of the slow-moving Englanders with their Royalty fixations or the devious French with their umbilical cord to the Catholic Church in Rome. They often joked in the tavern at night about the clueless Spanish and their search for the gold treasure of defeated civilizations. At least the gold made more sense than some crazy expeditions looking for the “Fountain of Youth”.

The Hollanders knew with that keen sense of business that the name of the game was right there on Manhattan Island. All of the power of the New World would be between the confluence of the two mighty rivers and they would rule the world from that seat of power sending Rome, London and Paris into the dustbins of history. Unfortunately, their national interest was buried in making myopic “deals” for paltry sums and they had no muscle to back up their greed-driven plans.

It was England, France and Spain that carved up the turkey in the New World and poor Holland was merely a footnote in history.

I started my business career in the sub-basement of a bank on Wall Street using coded communication devices to buy and sell stocks and bonds that were the “thirty pieces of silver” of the international financial world. Great fortunes moved from country to country like chess pieces of twenty-four carat gold hidden from the eyes of the general public and banking inspectors used code books that recorded transactions of such magnitude that ordinary people could never understand in terms of dollars and sense.

It was a strange experience for me after having ridden across the fields of Europe on a powerful fifty ton beast with enough firepower to take down a sizable domicile or destroy a bridge of merit needed to connect point A with point B.

The French, British and the Spanish were all together this time along with the upstart Americans defeating the thousand year empire that only made it to year twelve.

Now, the East and the West were locked in a fifty year struggle to see who cleared the board.

I retreated to my little hideout in the Wall Street basement and moved other people’s’ money around like a shuffleboard master on the doomed-by-fate Titanic.

Eventually, I woke up from that nightmare and found my way to a sleep-inducing, gently rocking Brooklyn subway train and went back to the roots of the American dream in the chaos of the Civil War and the glory that was found in successful “Manifest Destiny”.

It was such a strange feeling to have almost a full eight years of hard living under my belt and be standing in my old territory in the modern world only a few hours after I had disappeared. The conflicting timelines were heavy on my mind, but I tried to put a good face on it and smiled like I didn’t have a care in the world. Old faces that teased my memory looked at me like I was late for an appointment and I wanted to shout out, “I’ve been in fucking Gettysburg and marched with Sherman through fucking Atlanta, you assholes.”

Of course, I couldn’t do any such thing and I slowly sucked down a Bud light and puffed on a menthol-filtered cigarette with the joy of finding an old friend.

I had hesitated in returning to my old apartment because I didn’t want to meet up with my upstairs neighbor Doris who had informed me shortly before I left that she was in a family way. She blamed the entire affair on my neglectful attitude towards using proper protection early in the morning, when the thought of searching for a rubber was at the bottom of my priority list.

After my recent eight year struggle to survive in dire circumstances, I had a lot more sympathy for her predicament knowing that desperation tempers one’s attitude.

My bank account at the local office of the Wells Fargo system certified my account that I had opened almost one hundred and fifty years ago and the interest accumulated was astronomical in any sense of the word. I verified my assigned code-word and was granted access to the account that had been under legal renewal each year according to the terms of the special arrangement.

I checked into the Plaza up on Central Park South and took an entire suite to have some privacy as I got my feet back on the ground in the center of modern day capitalism with enough funds to join the club the old-fashioned way by flaunting my assets.