Louie reaches Trump from the grave CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Brangwen Family, #2)
This is my own summary of the information on the Xhaxahka case that I got from the flies on the wall.
With your permission I'm going to give you summaries more often than transcripts. After all I'm gathering and analyzing information, not just recording conversations.
Subject Trump got into the garage a little bit early. He was feeling empty and a little bit scared and shaky (we take regular samples of Trump's skin conductivity, perspiration and even his feces.) He told Einstein that the night before he gave him the phone and he talked with "the cop from the coroner's office" in Las Vegas he had had a premonition and as he went up the staircase to his room he had heard his landline telephone ringing. It was about three-thirty in the morning. He told Bamba that he just hadn't felt like picking up the phone. He had quit a couple hours early because he had got this long ride out to the Jersey Shore and the guy gave him two bills, two Benjamins. It was already around one o'clock. Trump said he was feeling out of sorts when he got back to his room. Besides, after work walking about a half a mile from the Kingsbridge Avenue number four stop he had to take a leak so bad he could almost taste it.
"Now I'm guessing that that was Louie calling me. In fact I know it now. Einstein told Trump that they got a package in the mail for him. Not really a package - it was one of those manilla envelopes, and the postmark was from Nevada and there was no return address on it."
Einstein couldn't resist telling Trump he should not use the company's address as his own even though he knew that
Trump probably had nothing to do with Albanian Louie's sending the package. Trump looked at the post mark on the envelope and mentioned to Bamba that it must have been in the office for more than two years.
Trump started reading the letter and shoved it back into the envelope.
"Look, just send me home today." (Any driver who's sent home gets priority the next day).
"You see it works like this: the fleets will hire any driver whose licenses are in order. Most of the year the fleets have the whip hand. That means they have more drivers than cars.
So, the drivers come in and wait. Some offer bribes of five or ten dollars. Some offer two-dollar tips. It's strictly up to Einstein which drivers "get out" and which drivers "get sent home." It's also up to Einstein which driver gets which car.
It may seem curious to you that Trump claims to be or tries to appear to be such a stickler for propriety and rules when it comes to cheating or bribing dispatchers. I find it out of character. Wouldn't you?
I've learned that Trump has dreams and ambitions. He makes false starts, like for example his would be career as an emergency medical technician. He never gets anywhere, These days he's nursing an ambition to become a Hollywood screen director. I think this has to do with the fact that he is sex - obsessed.
"Kevin lost his job believe it or not because of corruption. One of the drivers signed up with the garage down in Greenwich Village to be a crusader, not really a taxi driver.
"He bribed no one. He tipped no one. What he did was this: as he watched drivers show up after he did, and go to work before he did, he had a little tape recorder going. He also had a cousin on the City Council who was trying to make a name for himself as a great crusader and "friend of the hard working guys and gals." The fact that he had worked at every other garage in the city and only for a couple of days in each one was a secret that was not hard to keep.
"So this politician brought the roof down on all the fleets. It got into the newspapers as if this was some shocking development: Taxi were being forced to pay unlawful bribes in all the fleet garages in order to be allowed to work and in order not to be assigned to cars that were in dangerous condition.
"The only way to escape this madness for a driver was to sign up for a seven day lease. (After Uber got big they started offering 24x7 discount deals) I use the present tense because as the French say "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."
"Some drivers who were getting away with murder got fined and suspended by the Taxi Limousine Commission for paying bribes. Now what do I mean by "getting away with murder?" A driver who shows up at the job whenever he feels like it, usually around 2:30 on a Friday or Saturday afternoon but never on Sunday Monday or Tuesday and is immediately dispatched in a decent car is getting away with murder. The scandal shook everything up at the garage for about a month or two and these drivers as well as Kevin and Bob The Buddhist paid the price. I don't know if either one of them is fit for honest work. 1000 very small violins.
"I walked a little out of the neighborhood from Pleasant Avenue over to about Second Avenue. I found a luncheonette that was pretty empty. So I ordered a coffee and sat at a table.
"Then I took Louie's letter out of the envelope. For a minute I didn't want to look at it anymore. (I don't know if that's how somebody feels when they win the lottery because I was sure that Louie was going to tell me right in this letter where he hid the nine hundred thousand dollars. I want to work with you on this Billy. Sixty-forty. Can we shake on that?
"I was thinking about what I could do with a few hundred thousand dollars. I could buy a big three story house, cash, up on Bainbridge Avenue and rent rooms out to Fordham coeds. I would live on the ground floor and would rent out the four rooms on the second and third floors to college girls from Fordham.
"And I was just imagining collecting the rent. I'd make them pay every week not every month so that I could knock on their doors every week. I'd make it on Monday. And in my day dreaming that I was already doing well you know things are tight and maybe one of them would sometimes wanna work something out.
"But I was afraid to look. Why was this letter so fat? Finally I slid the papers out of the manila envelope and the waitress asked me if I wanted anything else so I said "gimme a refill okay?"
"So let me tell you what was in the letter. Louie said that he loves me and that he loved me for a long time and that he didn't know why, but maybe it's because I am a scumbag like him and I know it (and I do know it.)
"He said in the letter that he wanted to thank me for trying to help him (and I did try to help him.) I got him a room when he needed it and let me tell you what I did for him about his eye.
"Billy you know the Taxi Commission is like this: If you're in bad health, you're not supposed to be driving a cab. And if you go to a doctor you're supposed to notify them. Billy, you already know this. You're also supposed to give them a letter from a doctor that whatever it is you saw him for is cured. If you want to believe that.
"Well actually Louie had to renew his license, his hack license, a couple of weeks after he got popped in the eye that was stitched up at St Vincent's Hospital down in The Village. He's got only one good eye now. I thought for sure that he would just forget about working and go get that money and take a chance. So what if the mafia or whoever was watching him? What's the worst thing that would have happened?
"But you know Albanian Louie was a bit crazy and paranoid. So you know what the idiot did? He checked the 'Yes' box, that he had been to a doctor and he signed it and he mailed it back to them.
"So then naturally they sent him a letter and they said that they can't renew his license until they get a doctor's note that he's in good health and fit to drive a taxi. He must have been the only idiot out of 80,000 taxi drivers who confessed to the Taxi Commission that he saw a doctor.
"As it happens to be I have diabetes - not bad - not the worse kind of diabetes. At the clinic they told me it was prediabetes and they wrote a prescription for me for metformin.
"There is this clinic. They come around. I think they're from the Einstein Medical Center but I don't know for sure. It's not open all the time but they come around to the armory up on Kingsbridge Road and they set up and they do blood sugar and blood pressure tests. They also check for STDs. People pay what they think they can.
"So I went there and I said 'listen, I lost my medicine' which was a lie, 'and I need a new prescription'. So the Nurse Practitioner who was running the place wrote me out a prescription because it was easier than stopping everything and making phone calls and stuff. Besides, I said I didn't have the drug store's phone number which is true. I didn't. So the NP just whipped her prescription pad instead of looking up the drug store's phone number and going through all that rigmarole. So like I just told you she just took out a prescription pad and wrote me a prescription for metformin.
"So then I bought a little bottle of white out and I whited out everything that the nurse practitioner wrote.
"Then I went to a copy shop on Fordham Road and I put the prescription in the top center of the copy machine and I ran a copy of the prescription paper except what comes out is the size of a letter, you know. Doctor stationery it looks like.
"And then I wrote in my own handwriting that I had examined Louie and that he was in perfect health.
"And I signed it with the nurse's name.
"And Louie got his hack license in the mail.
"So in this letter Louie's talkin' about how he remembers I did that, and how good he felt like he had a friend in me who did something for him. And then he said maybe that's why he loves me.
"He told me that he was in the porno movies but they used to have a guy fluff him up so that he could do his act.
"He told me that Andrea and him were like brothers and sisters. That's what he said in the letter. And all this time I was supposing that Louie was bangin' her.
“And he wrote a whole bunch of stuff about things that we had talked about and that he tried to call me on the phone about 3:30 in the morning and he wanted to ask me one more time to come out to Vegas with him. But that no one answered the phone.
"Then he practically tells me his whole life story. I'm going to tell it to you."
And Billy says "this shit is interesting, right Andrea?"
"Louie was the kind of kid in school who could not sit still and was always making trouble. His parents tried everything. His father beat him with a belt. He told me this story about the second grade. You have to laugh at it.
"He's like the big ringleader in the class raising all kinds of hell. So one day he stands up in the classroom and he yells out "Choo Choo Charlie."
Now this is what he told me in the letter. The other Louie in the class was named Louis Shapiro and he was just as much a badass as our Louie was and they take these two chairs from underneath the desks and another one of the badasses sits down with the other Louis in the front and badass Louie behind him and holding onto the chair. Then four or five other kids get up and they're draggin' their chairs and join the train. Louie is in back pushing the train of little badasses in their chairs. He's yelling " Good and Plenty Good and Plenty choo choo Good and Plenty Good and Plenty"
and I'm laughing my ass off just telling you about this. He remembers the name of his teacher from the second grade, Miss Rosenberg. Miss Rosenberg is running back and forth in the front of the classroom she's almost out of control. She doesn't know what the fuck to do so she sends one of the goody two shoe kids to the principal's office. Louie remembers the principal's name too, Mr. Levine.
“And he's telling me all kinds of stuff about putting chewing gum in girls' ponytails and he grew up in the projects in Queensbridge in fact so did I but we didn't know each other. We lived on different blocks and we went to different schools.
"One day he had to be about eight years old and he's up on the roof of 40-01 Twelfth Street with frennemies French Canadian brothers Albert and Leo. The buildings in Queensbridge, they look like this: three or four buildings connected together but they're not really connected together they're about two or three feet apart. Anyway it was snowing and there was a lot of snow on the roof. They got up on the roof (which of course you're not supposed to go there) and there are these pebbles and little stones on the roof, and so they start making snowballs but inside the snowballs you got stones, little rocks (that's what Louie told me in the letter). The address is Twelfth Street but it faces on Twenty-first Street because as you know, Long Island City is kind of not exactly in numerical order. And they see this truck and Louie throws one of the snowballs that has a rock in it right down at the truck and it hits the windshield, the front windshield. The driver gets out, jumps out, and he's yelling bloody fuckin' murder and he runs towards 40-01. Louie, and the brothers Peter and Leo actually have to climb this little barrier about two foot tall and jump about two feet. Everything was icy and slippery and snowy and they run across the roof of 40-03 and they jump to 40-05. At that point there's no place else to jump to so they hit the staircase. As it happens Peter and Leo had a friend in the building from Catechism class, so Peter knocks on one of the doors and his friend whose name Louie forgets opens up the door and his mother and father are not home. They are both out and he lets them all in. Of course, they all share the story and everyone's laughing like they have just been on a class trip to the circus.
"So Louie was a maladjusted kid. That's what he said they said. In those days they didn't put kids on dope or speed but the school sent him to the school psychologist and the school psychologist said 'this kid is lazy, hostile, violent and disrespectful. So what do you expect me to do?'
"Louie was Catholic and he had three brothers and four sisters. The Housing Authority gave his parents two apartments and knocked down the walls between them. Louie got kicked out of his First Communion Class that St. Mary's Church had after school for the Catholic kids who are in public school. He never had his First Communion and so of course he never had Confirmation.
So here Aliciaa says "I remember he told me that he was scared that God was gonna strike him dead and put him in purgatory and then hell too."
"Then Louie wrote in the letter about how he had been so out of it in high school he just didn't click, not with the nerds and not with the gangsters, not with the jocks either and not with the in-betweens. The gangsters and the jocks all called him faggot. In those days it was not so unusual for high school boys that hung out together, that they had not quite grown out of that playing only with boys thing but it doesn't mean that they were doing each other. I don't know if there's any such thing like high school boys innocently hanging out together still too shy to make out with the girls. Louie said in the letter that he didn't even know what faggot meant, except a boy who is not into sports and can't fight. And that was Louie. On a couple of times some of the jocks slammed Louie into the lockers in the locker room at gym and called him faggot.
"It was not until Louie was in the Army that he figured out that he was gay. It happened while he was in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Now the first day of basic training (and I'm sure that his was like mine) the sergeants and lieutenants got all the soldiers in one squad bay after making them crawl with their duffel bags on their backs and they would go from soldier to soldier and say stuff like 'you're from New York. I bet you eat a lot of pussy. Don't you shitbird?' And the newbies, who they called 'shitbirds,' the guys that are just in the Army their first day are shaking their heads yes they did that. And the guys from West Virginia - they said to them that you got a lot of poontang 'dincha shitbird?' All of these guys are practically bald. They had been marched to the battalion barber shop where they were basically scalped by the retired sergeants who worked as barbers.
"Louie started looking and staring at the other guys junk. It seemed irresistible and he tried very hard not to do this and he got better at it in time. Now this is what Louie says in his letter. And I always thought that he was banging that waitress.
"Next was the shower. The lieutenants and sergeants were all standing outside the shower yelling 'come on, come on hurry hurry hurry let's go let's go let's go' and in the shower he got hard. Embarrassing.
"In the barracks Louie's bunk was on the second floor. These are double bunks in a great big squad bay and Louie's bunk is up on top. As soon as lights out they have to be in their cots underneath the blankets and he is hearing "thunk thunk thunk" and the bunk is shaking.
"At the end of the fourth week the sergeants, lieutenants, and the corporals all eased up on the harassment. They let the troops eat breakfast without hovering over them or getting in their faces yelling 'hurry up shitbird.' There were no more late night boot drills.
"A couple of the other New York guys sort of dragged him along with them to the DeSoto Hotel - on the company's first twenty-four hour pass after four weeks of non stop 'happy horseshit.'
"The young soldiers each got separate
rooms. Louie was sitting in his room and this woman, she's not ugly, she's not gorgeous, she's not fat, she's not skinny bangs on his door. He opens the door and there she is in her panties and bra. She says "so ya want some company solja boy?" with a smile and a Southern drawl.
rooms. Louie was sitting in his room and this woman, she's not ugly, she's not gorgeous, she's not fat, she's not skinny bangs on his door. He opens the door and there she is in her panties and bra. She says "so ya want some company solja boy?" with a smile and a Southern drawl.
“So Louie says in the letter that he figured that he was the only virgin in the whole basic training company and so this young woman is going to bust his cherry for him, finally make a man out of him so to speak.
"So Louie was telling himself that he's finally going to be a man. (This is all in his letter now.)
"The woman comes into Louie's room and she sits on the bed and takes off her panties and her bra. She tells Louie 'honey put forty dollars on the table sweety' which Louie did and Louie was trembling. So what happened after that was that Louie took off his clothes. The woman says to him, "don't be scared doll. Hmmmm, mother nature was so good to you! You're so big! How about if I'm your girlfriend every time you get a pass? Now lay back and try to relax. The meter's running'
"Louie lays back. She starts playing with his wong and all he's feeling is fingers. Then she swings around and puts it in her mouth. And Louie says in the letter that nothing was happening except he was more and more embarrassed and afraid that word was going to get out in his Company and that he will never live it down.
"The second floor of the barracks has this big squad bay like I told you and there's a room where Drill Corporal Smithers stays. I'm going to cut to the quick here. You get the picture. Corporal Smithers broke Louie's cherry.
Then Trump lit up a cigarette, inhaled deeply and let the smoke out through his nostrils .Then he picked up on Louie's letter.
"Louie's letter goes on about his time in Rahway prison in Jersey, how he became a slave of a gang. He said he probably stayed alive because he was able to help some people read and write letters from home and to their women. He even did some research in the library on some of their cases. He became a pretty good jailhouse lawyer. Rahway is also where Louie got turned on to heroin.
