The Creep (15 page)

Residents of Manhattan go there just to get out of their apartments and breathe the fresh air, which sometimes isn't so fresh.

A school teacher from the Bronx brought her class of kids, about fifty of them, and as they walked into the park, by the statue at Columbus Circle, the smell of urine was unmistakable. All the kids were holding their noses and making poo
-
pooing noises. The teacher said, "I can smell Jasmine!" and all the kids giggled.

But at night, Central Park becomes a whole different world. You wouldn't even know
there was a city out there, other than being able to hear police sirens in the distance.

The whole giddy-up is different. It is proven that death lingers and lurks behind every tree, shrub and wall and under every bridge.

The crime and violence in Central Park increases dramatically when it is a full moon. The official version of the increase is thirty-two percent. The true figure is that it increases over eighty percent and what goes down in Central Park is horrific.

Walking through the park at night is a frightening experience for anyone. There are delinquents out there with guns, knives and garrotes and others with twenty-power starlight scopes. The electronically amplified light from the full moon, stars and Manhattan street lighting give a picture a gray-
green hue, kind of eerie. Sometimes when looking through a starlight scope you see someone looking at you through a starlight scope
...
Fuck!

Bishman walked through the park. The moon was
full,
a solitary duck swam on the pond. In the background there was a drunk shouting "Buck, give us a buck, need a buck. Buck!"
Who the fuck's going to give a drunk a buck in Central Park, full moon, two in the morning?
God only knows. All of a sudden he was silent, someone must have bottled him.

Bishman walked around the edge of the lake and started toward the bridge. A man standing on the bridge was silhouetted up against the skyline. Bishman gripped his marine knife, not too hard. He kept walking toward the bridge, the
solitary figure stood still. They looked at each other and Bishman kept walking slowly, determined, alert. Once he had started to cross the bridge he was committed. The guy was a six feet two, three hundred and ninety pound, black guy, broad-shouldered, built like a brick shithouse. His street name was 'Barbarian.'

Bishman kept walking, the plastic bags over his sneakers making a rustling noise. They looked at each other and simultaneously nodded an acknowledgement. Barbarian pulled his stomach in, as a signal to say walk past. Bishman look
ed him in the eye and said "Booo
...
",
walked straight past and didn't look back. Central Park after dark has its own code of unwritten laws. This was one of them, whatever it was.

Suddenly a huge owl swooped down low and snatched up what appeared to be a
field mouse
. Its wings made a frightening flapping sound. Bishman stood still to regain his composure, his heart was pounding. When he looked up he saw his target in the bushes, standing still, also waiting for a victim, waiting to try out psychotic behaviors.

The guy saw Bishman too, and knew he could take him. He could plainly see the knife Bishman held in his right hand, but this guy was strong and fit, he worked out every day, lifted weights, took care of himself, the last of the
hard men. Mr. Body-Perfect. He puffed himself up like a bullfrog to make himself look even bigger and confronted Bishman, who was raising his marine knife. The hard man grabbed Bishman's wrist with
both his hands. The knife and wrist were locked solid, there was nowhere to go, nothing to do.

"Jesus H. Christ!"
The man let loose the most hideous, frightening scream you ever heard. He released his grip to clutch at his stomach. Warm, sticky blood trickled through his fingers. He hadn't seen the serrated bread-knife in Bishman's left hand, the one that had been pointing backwards. He let out a prolonged, blood-curdling scream of terror. Bishman had ripped into his gut with the bread-knife and twisted it. He was wailing like a mental patient. As the hard man released Bishman's right hand, the marine knife in that hand came flailing down too. A ghastly smell permeated the air as his bladder and bowels simultaneously released, as they often do in violent death.

Bishman left him for dead with thirty-seven knife wounds. He would arrive in the Bronx Hospital as a D.O.A. The newspapers wrote up the murder, calling it a cowardly, frenzied attack. No mention was made of why the victim was in the middle of Central Park at four o'clock in the morning. At the age of twenty-nine, the guy had owned and controlled a computer company operating out of Queens, with a turnover in excess of fifty million dollars. But he still enjoyed being in Central Park around the time of the full moon.

His name has been withheld to protect his family, who are still in the process of squabbling over his estate.

Bishman retraced his footsteps that led him to the edge of the
park,
he didn't want to go any further.
Not with all those fuckin' whackos,
weirdos and psychos out there, no way, boogaloo
, he thought.

Ju
st before the exit, he slipped
the plastic bags off his sneakers and took off the old tracksuit top and mismatching bottoms that had streaks of blood
splattered over them and stuck them deep inside a trash can. Bishman knew the trash would be emptied before seven o'clock that morning.

On the way out of the park, at the exit by West 72nd Street, Bishman noticed a terrible itching on his left wrist, right by his scar. Of all things he'd been bitten by a mosquito and it itched like hell. Bishman dug his thumbnail deep into the insect bite and then dug it in again, at right angles, to form the sign of a cross.
'Well it always worked before,'
thought Bishman as he dug his thumbnail in again to reinforce the sign.

Bishman tried hard to remember who told him that little trick but he couldn't, so he started humming
Mack the Knife
. He was halfway through his tune when he remembered,
Yeah, it must have been that cretin, Michael Shwartz. Same guy who told me dragon flies would zip up my eyes and I'd attract rattle snakes to me if I meditated in the forest
...Yeah! Michael Shwartz, my ass! Fuckin' cretin!

Bishman spat a groobly on the ground. He couldn't tell whether it bounced or not
...
it probably did.

Harvey would give Bishman feedback at opportune moments. This was one of them:

"Good stuff, Bob. I know we've talked a lot, with you both in the trance state and in the conscious state. The important thing to realize about the feedback that I give you
is,
that it's no biggie. Don't try to find answers in it, just let your subconscious mind assimilate it. Like I say, just relax. You don't even have to listen to me, because I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to your subconscious mind.

"The thing about drinking is this: All the
counselors
have been asking you why you drink. I don't think that's important. I would like you to ask
yourself the question: What would I do if I didn't drink?
S
imple as that, no biggie."

Many times Bishman would ramble for many hours, all recorded by Harvey, only to come up with one coherent experience right at the end of a regression. This is one of those many sessions:

Chicago is known as Windy
City,
and for good reason too. The biting North wind comes sweeping right in over Lake Michigan and the towering skyscrapers, causing howling vortexes that are unknown anywhere else in America. In winter, the place gets bitterly cold. This particular day, there were plenty of dead umbrellas and plenty of dead rainbows too.

The dead umbrellas are obvious: the cheap flimsy things that are all too often made in China these days, just can't hack the pressure of Windy City. At the end of
each windy day the streets are l
ittered with them. The dead rainbows are from Bishman's childhood. His sister, Ghislaine, when she was alive, used to point them out to him. Whenever it rained, the patches of gasoline in the street would turn all the colors of the rainbow.
Hence the expression, dead rainbows.

The day Bishman found himself in town was a particularly windy one, and it was the bitterly cold wind and driving rain that had forced him into the first bar he came across, after the
truckie dropped h
im off.
             

Pussy Galore is probably the roughest bar on Chicago's notorious East Side, in a seriously rough neighborhood known by Bishman as the Combat Zone. It could even be the roughest bar in the whole of the States.

The minute he walked into Pussy Galore he realized he'd made a big mistake.
To quote Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman,
"Big mistake, huge!"
Everyone glowered at him. He was obviously a stranger in a strange place. All the usual weirdos, whackos, alkies and druggies were there. Bishman, King of Serial Killers, could pick up the vibes, even the barman's face said drink up and go, post haste!

There was sawdust on the floor and the walls were decorated with hundreds of photographs of Al Capone and the prohibition era. There were cased Thompson submachine guns, the
old "Tommy" guns, decorating the place - fixed firmly to the walls. A huge mural of the St. Valentine's Day massacre adorned the main wall. Pictures of George "Machine Gun" Kelly and "Pretty Boy" Floyd, toting Tommy guns, seemed to be everywhere. Pictures of Dillinger with his tiny gun, posing as though it were a brand-new toy, hung over the bar.

There was even a large cartoon of "Baby Face" Nelson getting gunned down by G-Men holding Tommy guns. He got hit with seventeen bullets. In the cartoon he was being asked if it hurt, replying: "Only when I laugh."

Bishman sipped his bourbon, slowly. He had a memory pop into his head.
Once he'd wandered into a restaurant early one Sunday morning, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Of the two hundred diners he was the only white man, all the rest were black. He didn't walk
out,
he carried on as though everything was cool, which it was. He ate two breakfasts, paid the tab and left. No problem
.

However, he did have a problem here and it was getting progressively and aggressively worse. By the time he had ordered his fourth Jim Bean he had goons sitting either side of him. The meanest son-of-a-bitch, a guy by the
name of Sonny Claymore, reputed to have killed over seventeen hoodlums for various mobsters in Chicago, stared coldly into Bishman's eyes. Bishman stared back, pale blue eyes bugging out, jutting
his chin forward and said "Boo
..." in a scary sort of way.

Claymore ordered himself a whiskey and judging by the way he did, you'd surmise he knew the barman pretty well.

"Just how hard are you?" grunted the steely-eyed Claymore, looking Bishman straight between the eyes, not backing down for a second, at the same time thrusting a NATO Bowie knife with a ten-inch blade deep into the bar counter.

Blunt as a boar's ass, thought Bishman as he pulled a Spanish switch blade from a sheath in his sock. He pressed the release button and an eight-inch blade flew out of the end and locked firmly into place.

On the Cobra Mk 8, which Bishman happened to have, you could put that sucker up to someone's throat, press the release switch and the blade would sink its full depth into the victim. Nothing could stop it. That's what you paid over $300 for, certainly worth stealing, which is exactly what Bishman had done earlier that day.
A knife for the serious blademan only.
A powerful, lethal bit of kit, stiletto pointed, hollow ground and razor sharp, both edges.

Bishman held the knife. Claymore and his buddy couldn't help being impressed with the speed the blade came out. It was electrifying. Claymore put his hand around the big Bowie knife that was well lodged into the bar. Bishman took his Cobra in his right hand, held it up slowly and deliberately, and proceeded to pull its razor-sharp blade across his own left wrist. He ordered a Jim Bean, a double. When the barman brought it over, he sent it back.