There was exactly one reason I moved to New York City: to write for Late Night with David Letterman. It was pretty much the most popular TV show on the planet back then, a million light-years ago, an era when all conversations everywhere began with, “Didja see what Dave did last night? Wasn’t his Top Ten List just a scream?”
The weird thing was: I had a serious shot at the coolest job in late-night TV history.
Over the summer the show’s head writer had called me in response to the packets of jokes I kept sending him. He said he thought he could hire me in September. And what was I doing in the Pacific Northwest, anyway, he asked. I should be living in New York, he assured me.
So, like a fool, I went.
The universe met my arrival in Manhattan with a number of portents that, had I been paying attention, could mean only one thing: “About-face! Return to the Pacific Northwest immediately! Take the next flight to Portland!”
Alas, I wasn’t listening.
Within my first two weeks in New York City, there was a hurricane, an earthquake, and the cat that came with the apartment I’d sublet had found a litter of mice and kept dumping bloody rodent heads on my pillow. After a few days of that, I moved into a hotel that was seriously dodgy — as evident from the bullet hole-ridden elevator.
It caught fire my second night there, and I almost jumped from the window of my 9th-floor hotel room. A bunch of people who did leap from their windows plunged to their deaths.
After that, I started moving all over the city, including to the loft of a wannabe singer-songwriter who practiced her heinous one-and-only song from 6 AM to midnight, with moving lyrics that included, “Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo.”
September had come and gone — the head writer said an exodus of Late Night writers he’d expected in fact hadn’t happened, but nevertheless I was only a high-speed-moving-vehicle away from the writing position, assuming that the high-speed-vehicle plowed into a Late Night writer.
So thinking my new job would start up any week, I stayed in New York, meeting a tall businessman named Ernie who proposed to me the first night, saying he was looking for Wife Number 8, an offer I declined. However, when he offered me a job at his lace warehouse, I accepted. Which was another mistake.
Searching for a living situation that didn’t involve the lyrics “Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo,” I moved into a sublet in the West Village, not knowing then that the neighborhood was notorious for supernatural activity. The guy who sublet his ground-floor apartment, in a musty building built in the 1920s, was a 40-something accountant, sort of a nerd.
His apartment was one of those long, narrow railroad car designs, with a modest living room in the front where very large wrenches and World War II posters hung on the walls, a decorative style that I called “Early Old Man.”
Past a tiny kitchen was the very dark bedroom with a small window — and next to it, a windowless bathroom.
The place was actually pretty dodgy, but the price was right.
Just after I’d paid the rent for the entire three months upfront, the accountant told me that things would soon become noisy. A construction would be renovating the apartment right across the hall.
“An old Indian, an Iroquois, died a few weeks ago,” he said. “Nice guy, came over here quite a few times.” He paused, expressing guilt for not checking up on his neighbor. “After they found him,” the accountant continued, “I peeked into his apartment for the first time — he’d been living in this building for fifty years. Every room was piled to the ceiling with dusty old stuff.”
I wondered if that was where the accountant found some of the key pieces of his “Early Old Man” collection. And thought nothing more of it.
The next day I moved in.
And the next week, the drilling, banging, and clanging began as they renovated the dead Iroquois’ apartment. I later wondered if that noisy process displaced him and if he came to the accountant’s apartment to ask what the hell what happening.
Because early on, I started feeling like someone was watching me. Not in a bad way, not in a scary way. Just that I wasn’t alone in the West Village apartment.
One night after another annoying day at the lace warehouse — where I was assistant to the office manager, Geraldine, who despised me — I came home, craving a joint.
The accountant didn’t seem like much of a partier, and I’m not one to rummage about in sublet apartments. But I became obsessed with the idea that there was a tin of smoke close at hand — specifically in the bottom left drawer of the desk, under some folders.
The thought wouldn’t go away. So after an hour, I finally pulled open the drawer and in the very back, under some folders, I found an old rusty tin. Inside: a bag of gold, tasty, and very potent pot.
So I smoked it, frequently, over the next two weeks — and my comedy bits, which I continued sending to Letterman’s head writer, who continued assuring me I was just a high-speed-moving vehicle away from a writing job, were funnier than ever, I thought.
Just after I ran out of the smoke, a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend from Portland called me out of the blue. He was in New York — did I want to go out for a drink? I was broke, so of course I said yes.
We met at the Bodacious Cafe, one street away from my apartment in the West Village. And it was, predictably, one of those awesome evenings — we clicked right away, most likely because “the door knob aphrodisiac,” as my sister calls it, was in effect. Or, as I put it “The most appealing man in the world is the one walking out the door.” And this one, Roger let’s call him, was flying back to Portland that night.
As he was about to leave I said, as people do, “Look me up the next time you’re in town. You can stay at my place.” I figured I’d be living in a swanky 3-bedroom flat by then and rolling in money since, of course, any day, I’d be a Letterman writer.
His eyes lit it. He said he was going to the loo. But a few minutes later I saw him talking at the phone booth.
He finally returned 15 minutes later. “Hope you were serious about your offer,” he said. “Because I just paid $150 to change my flight.”
“You changed your flight?” I sputtered. “You’re staying a couple days longer? At my place?”
“Two weeks longer to be precise.”
“Huh, Okey doke,” I said, wondering what I’d just gotten myself into.
The doorknob aphrodisiac was no longer in effect since he was no longer walking out the door and on his way to the airport. We left the Bodacious Cafe — and I put him on the not terribly comfortable couch under the wall-mounted wrenches in the living room.
The next morning I woke up late, which was trauma-inducing because if I ever got to the lace warehouse one minute after 9, Geraldine would scream about it for the next week. And that morning I looked to be half-an-hour tardy. So I was frantic and cursing and it was certainly not an ideal situation for my guest on the couch, whom I barely bid adieu to as I ran out the door.
Returning home that evening after work, I slapped on a smile to compensate for the jarring start to the day. That evening, however, it was my guest’s mood that was surly. Roger had spoken to his boss to tell him about his extended stay in New York — and the boss wasn’t pleased because Roger had been supposed to pick up a payment later that week.
“So what is your job exactly?” I asked. He’d mentioned the night before he was in finance.
But that evening he clarified that in fact he was a loan shark. A mafioso. Staying at my place for two weeks.
“Huh, well why don’t you change your flight again and go back tonight?” I suggested.
He said he’d already changed it once and he couldn’t afford to change it again. Underscoring his financial woes, when we went out to a Chinese restaurant, he ordered two appetizers and one beer. I got a lone pot sticker out of the deal. In contrast to the night before, that evening we were glaring at each other, acting like an old married couple that should have gotten divorced a few decades back.
When we went back to my apartment, he went to the couch in the living room and I headed to the bedroom. I was stone-cold sober and not the least bit high, having run out of the killer gold smoke days before.
And that’s when I saw something on the wall behind the bed: a shimmery neon-green light, about the size of a cantaloupe. “Huh,” I thought, “there must be a crystal in the window that I never noticed before.”
So I went to the window — but there was no crystal there. I pulled down the shade, but that had no effect. I opened and closed the bathroom door, turned on and off lights, moved things around, to no avail. The green light was still there. It was now about the size of a large pumpkin.
I had no idea what was producing that green light, so I went to the living room, wanting to be scientific in my approach. “Roger, can you look in my bedroom? Do you see anything unusual?”
“Oh,” he said. “You mean the green light on the wall?”
“Yes,” I said. “Can you determine the source of that green light?”
“Obviously,” he said with manly confidence, “you have a crystal in the window.”
So Roger went to the window, and not finding a crystal, he pulled the shade up and down, then turned on and off the lights, and opened and shut all the doors. After 10 minutes of trying everything, he sat down on the bed, clearly spooked.
“I don’t know where it’s coming from. But look what’s happening to the wall!”
The green lights on the wall had doubled in size. What’s more, the green lights started coming off the wall as neon orbs, light a meteor shower shooting across my bedroom.
And that’s where our reaction becomes irrational. Why didn’t we just run out of the apartment? Instead, we just grabbed each other and pulled the blanket over our heads. And again, strangely, we both fell promptly to sleep.
The next morning there was no sign of the green light show — the wall looked entirely normal. As I got ready for work, I heard Roger talking on the phone. When I was at door, he showed up with his suitcase. “Decided to go back today after all,” he said. “I’ll take the subway in with you.”
Here’s another odd thing: We didn’t talk about the spooky happenings the night before at all — not on the walk to the station, not when we sat together on the subway. When the subway arrived at Grand Central Station, he thanked me for hospitality and bolted. Just before the doors closed, however, he stuck in his head and yelled over at me. “Those green lights on the wall — that was a ghost!”
When I got home from work, the place seemed entirely normal. And that’s when it hit me: the dead Iroquois had driven out my mafioso guest. So I thanked him for his gallantry and the spectral light show and told him that in case he didn’t know, he was dead. I told him he was welcome to stay if he wanted, but I never sensed him at all after that.
But here’s the weird thing: when the accountant returned, I told him I had a confession to make. “Sorry, I smoked your pot,” I told him. “What pot?” he said. “I don’t have any pot.”
“Well you used to have some,” I noted. “In the old tin in the third drawer of your desk. I don’t know how I knew it was in there, but I did.”
“What tin are you talking about?” he asked, pulling open the third desk drawer, where I’d returned the now-empty tin. He pulled it out, looked at it — and then a look of shock overtook his face.
“I’d totally forgotten about this,” he said. “My Iroquois neighbor gave it to me, filled with pot. Must have been at least a decade ago.”
“Yeah, I think he was hanging around here,” I said.
Of course the accountant didn’t believe me.
Not too much later, I finally gave up on Late Night and left New York.
But years later when I was visiting Portland, I ran into Roger, who was no longer a mafioso — he’d become instead a masseuse.
“Do you remember the green lights on the wall?” I asked him.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “Weirdest thing that ever happened in my life.”
It certainly wasn’t the strangest thing that ever happened in mine. But I would put it on the Top Ten list.
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