Dispatch 1/25/23: The Bone Crusher

The night we meet the Bone Crusher

I’m posted up in the corner of a party in the Lower East Side with Tai, who now has bright orange hair and is dressed like she’s from The Matrix, in a place with white walls that feels like an Airbnb, and through all the fog and flashing lights and nightcore music we can see pretty clearly all the green faces of kids who came here from the internet. We’re observing the way they pose for the photographers ambling through the crowd. It seems like there’s a photographer for every fifth person in here, some of them are old masters and some are debutants themselves, and their task is to snap up a bunch of suggestive candid shots out of this bubblegum prom. My own task is similar, I suppose. Their documentation will be impressive. If you were having some sort of steamy illicit affair this would be a bad place to bring your mistress.

Patrick comes back after trying to dance with some dude who was standing alone awkwardly and looking like he wasn’t having a good time. He says that the dude was weirded out by him and seemed to think that Patrick was trying to hit on him, which I guess is how Patrick’s platonic gesture would necessarily be understood in the heterosexual imaginary of downtown. Even the twinks in fishnet shirts are straight here! Just the other weekend Tai and I were at another party, this time in Bushwick, thrown by the same people, our friends, with the same DJs, but which nonetheless had a remarkable difference in “ambient queerness,” not to mention camera density. Brooklyn really is a different world. We go outside to smoke cigarettes and wait for Michael Saltypickles.

Michael pulls up. He had just been at Clandestino with Beckett and Kelly, a.k.a. “Audrey Horne” on Twitter, and just before that he and Kelly saw La Traviata at the Met Opera. Kelly is from Oregon and was homeschooled and has a bunch of conservative aesthetic fancies and ideological drives that she satisfies living as close to the bon vivant Dimes Square socialite niche Twitter microcelebrity life as one possibly can from Washington, DC. She seems pretty popular among the New York crowd but some of the hardline Twitter fascists have grown suspicious of her because every now and then she’ll denounce sexist abuse or something and that always gets the freaks howling, which is amusing and makes me more sympathetic to her. I’ve crossed paths with her a few times in New York because she visits the city frequently, but I never met her while I was living in DC. Michael says she is very sweet and that she’s doing well and I say I’m happy to hear that.

I introduce Patrick and Michael and we talk for a bit. It turns out that Patrick somehow knows some of Michael’s childhood friends from the Bay area. Patrick is from Texas and he now lives in Chicago where he’s getting a PhD, but he’s strangely well-connected with the downtown world for someone who hasn’t lived in New York. Some of the connections are from a past life in undergrad at Reed College (unsurprisingly, tons of kids from Reed, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and so on, seem to wind up in this little world), some are from working in music industry nightlife stuff, but my connection to him is purely through the internet. Back in the summer he messaged me on Instagram as “Based Henry Kissinger,” saying that he had been reading my Substack and that we should meet up while he was in New York because we have similar ideological and aesthetic goals—namely, defeating the fascist creep that has found a home among the charlatan New York petty bourgeois trendsetters and which had ominously begun to spread throughout the broader culture. We had met up and agreed to wage a campaign of literary-polemical terrorism against angelicism, who seemed a more threatening enemy then than now. Patrick then went back to his little intellectual fortress in the south side of Chicago, where he’s since been immersed in the history of the monetary systems of early modern states.

Around that time in the summer I told Patrick I was thinking about investigating the Praxis Society, which is a California VC-backed group that’s trying to make a “technofuturist solarpunk city on a Mediterranean island.” Basically, an entity that’s spiritually related to Urbit in its effort to leverage low interest rates toward something that never really expects to materialize beyond cultivating a secret-society–salon culture in the fertile concrete of New York’s downtown scene. But they were on high alert for journalists at this time because someone else had just written a pretty funny first-person narrative article about attending one of their dinners that made them all sound especially ridiculous. So I was getting to this story a bit late. Patrick told me to talk to his friend A, who had attended one of the Praxis Society events before they started getting more secretive. A is cool and I had a nice conversation with her about her experience at the goofy Praxis Society event. But I never ended up finishing the piece because the summer took a wild turn with the big Peter Vack film set struggle session, where I had incidentally encountered A working one of the tables in some administrative capacity—I think she was collecting the video consent and release forms, or something innocent like that. And then I saw her around a lot, a real player in the scene, Patrick’s random friend! “Classic city politics,” Patrick says to me when I tell him his contact is more plugged in than I had initially realized, when I underestimated how bound together all our fates really are, “you take power and immediately deputize all your friends…”

We all go back into the party, which has thinned out a little bit now that most of the photographers are gone, and we hang out for a while observing people. The music is like 20 BPM slower now and we are grooving with it. I’m trying to give Patrick context to some of these apparitions in this crowd. Art column writer. Downtown feuilleton editor. Model, probably. Sculptor. Podcaster. Instagram meme account admin. Cinema enjoyer. Prospective cult member. Guy who DJed a bunch of Web3 raves back when the interest rates were lower. Random person you always see at these things. Clout theorist. Aspiring poet who will soon be ground to dust.

Eventually we leave the party and Tai goes home to Brooklyn. I hang out a bit longer with Patrick and Michael and we go to the park on Essex Street right next to Dimes Square to smoke some weed. Michael and I are on a park bench telling Patrick about all the stuff that’s gone down in the city since he was here last while Patrick rolls a bunch of spliffs. Michael tells us about the time he sold ketamine to Curtis Yarvin after the Forever Magazine party, how Yarvin came up to him afterward asking about dosages, and how he had told the man you just snort up whatever you can fit on the tip of a key.

An old drunk man on a bike wearing an army camouflage jacket pulls up out of nowhere and starts talking to us. The man asks us what we’ve been up to tonight, and he tells us he’s been hanging around here in the Lower East Side since long before we were born. He begins to tell his tale, enunciating every syllable with incredible force. This everyday encounter has us entranced. There is no escape now. He tells us his name is Orlando, but he’s also known as THE BONE CRUSHER. He’s half Puerto Rican and half Sicilian. Every male member of his family since 1898, since EIGHTEEN NINETY-EIGHT he says, has been a member of the United States army. The Puerto Ricans are the best troops, he tells us. He asks us if we know the Taino word for Puerto Rico, and we say no. His eyes light up. BORRRRRRRINQUEN. He tells us about how the Taino people hurled themselves off cliffs rather than accept slavery at the hands of the white men. He tells us about how he was in VIETNAM, how he was in SAIGON when the city fell. He shows us his VA card proving he was in the Army. He tells us how he’s responsible for killing 37 people, two of them STATESIDE, for which he spent 16 years in a MAXIMUM-SECURITY PRISON along with serial killers and the guy who killed Malcolm X. He tells the story of how he murdered the two guys stateside, how he went into a bar in his military uniform and some thug said “who’s that FAGGOT in the military uniform,” and how he ignored the guy at first, and then the guy said “I SAID, who’s that FAGGOT in the military uniform,” and before the Bone Crusher could even turn to face the guy he was already being punched, and then the Bone Crusher beat the shit out of that guy, and the guy left the bar defeated. The bartender said that the other guy did this to every new person in that bar, and that it was the first time the bartender saw someone righteously beat the shit out of him. The bartender asked the Bone Crusher what he wanted to drink. WHISKEY STRAIGHT, said the Bone Crusher. And as he was drinking his whiskey the other guy came back with a friend and a gun. He put his gun right to the Bone Crusher’s head, but before he could shoot, the Bone Crusher grabbed the guy’s gun and shot one bullet point blank right in his FUCKING SKULL. The other guy’s friend had a gun too, but he had just dropped it to the ground as he was pulling it out of his pants. DON’T YOU DARE GRAB THAT FUCKING GUN, the Bone Crusher growled. And do you know what he did? What did he do, we ask. HE WENT FOR THE FUCKING GUN, so the Bone Crusher put FOUR BULLETS right in his chest. And then the Bone Crusher stepped over the two bullet-ridden corpses and splattered brain detritus and left the bar. Even though he left his fingerprints on the whiskey glass, his fingerprints were not yet in the police database because he had no criminal record at the time. But once the cops found out that he was a military guy, which has its own record of fingerprints, it was over. But he said his real mistake was leaving the bar in the first place, because had he stayed, he could’ve claimed self-defense. Then came SIXTEEN YEARS in prison, in which he was part of a notorious prison gang, it was something COMMANDOS, and the COMMANDOS were so notorious that the FBI sent in a bunch of agents undercover as prisoners, and even then the COMMANDOS didn’t snitch. He talks about how he was feared by the ARYAN BROTHERHOOD, and how one time the Aryan Brotherhood put up an effigy of a black baby in a noose in the jailhouse yard, and that the Black gang didn’t want to start shit with the Aryan Brotherhood so he took it upon himself to tell off the Aryan Brotherhood, and he told them that they had FIFTEEN MINUTES to take that black baby down. And you know what they did? What did they do, we ask. They took that baby down in FIFTEEN SECONDS. He talks about leaving prison, how he would’ve gotten 25 years if not for his military service, and time skips to the 90s, SOUTH BRONX, he was in the back of a church SMOKING CRACK, SOUTH BRONX, he was in an apartment with this girl, she was only SIXTEEN, he needed money, and then it jumps back to the MILITARY, SAIGON, he starts talking about the PROLETARIAT, about the SICKLE that represents the PEASANTRY and the HAMMER that represents the PROLETARIAT, he’s down with STALIN, which we all think is pretty cool. He tells us he’s writing a book, called CHRIST IN THE HOLE, but the way he articulates it makes it sound like it’s CHRIST IN THE HOOD, which it actually might be, because when he repeats himself it sounds even more ambiguous, and we don’t want to ask him again. Through this entire time, Patrick and Michael are the more talkative ones, verbally reacting to his story, Patrick in his folksy Texan way and Michael in his Cali stoner way, I’m more quiet, but for some mysterious reason the Bone Crusher is focused directly on me, pushing his knuckles down on my knees as he emphasizes each syllable, only turning his gaze to the more vocal others on my flanks every now and then. He tells us that God has a plan for all of us, he shows us a massive scar where his throat was apparently slit, he knocks on his jaw to show that his face is almost entirely titanium beneath the skin, and then he wishes us well and rides off on his bicycle into the night, disappearing in the vague direction of Canal Street.