THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: FREEPORT RETIREMENT

When the guy shows up, he's one of those fucks from network broadcast. I mean, those guys never fucking change, even back when I was at it with the Post and did that stringer shit for Eyewitness news, it was like they grew this type of guy in the fucking lab somewhere. A man-child. Young and bright eyed, with glasses and some sort of sad excuse for facial hair that was supposed to get his ass over the hump to respectability.

Ethan something or other. A Current Affair. Hey Mr. so-and-so, I understand you were on Son of Sam in 1976 and 1977, and I'm like, sure there, Ethan, I was. And he starts taking notes. And I'm thinking a lot of things, like how I can see goose shit all over the walk in the February sun on the little man-made lake here at Freeport Retirement. About how the bag man did that thing he did back in 1977. About the little mob man. And in the end I think, you know, fuck it. My kidneys are shot, my liver is swollen, and when I have to take a shit I can't catch my breath near the end.

Fuck it. It's been years.

So, I tell him everything and it goes like this:

I tell him how the first Son of Sam letter took me to a bunch of book stores in New York in 1977 looking up Beelzebub. How that lead to the Club uptown and how I found that ring of hangers-on there who all seemed to treat the murders in the same way a field botanist might treat a robust, but otherwise mundane plant, "oh, that". These people were rich, they were connected, and they were fucking bored. Drugs, dancing, fucking. Lots of blow. It was the seventies after all. And how I fell in with these guys, charging the Post for drinks the whole time.

It had reached a point to where I didn't really even care about the case anymore when I was there, just getting laid, and it was a good place to go and get laid, let me tell you. It was alright. And the shootings went on. And the letters came. And for about a month I frequented the club until I got to meet the proprietor, this uptight freak in a suit who looked like Bowie and everyone called B. And soon after that I would always drink for free.

Sometimes, some of the people I knew there would make guesses about the killer or the killings. "He's collecting souls, like Zodiac," one fucker who would later be found in a footlocker filled with lime said to me one night, "he knows what he's doing." It was about then I started to see people I recognized from photos over the crime beat desk a lot. Castellano guys, you know. Lots of highly-placed drug dealers. Lots of juice.

And then there was the bag man. He was always out of place there, really. Had this crazy Vietnam vet look.  Hair like something pulled out of a vacuum, sores on his face, long, yellowed uncut fingernails. And his bag. He carried one of those green garbage bags everywhere with him. I mean, it's not weird to have something like some homeless dude in a club, but it IS weird for him to stay there. To be let in again and again, and to be given drinks and shit. Anyway, he was welcome.

And near the end of my time there, I saw the bag man talking with lots of people. With B. With a bunch of well-dressed mobster types. With a member of a band that had just sold out Madison Square Garden. I saw a lot of weird shit. And sometimes, he'd let them reach in the bag, and they'd pull out something small and not really visible. Something they could cup in their hand.

I once asked a guy I saw get a poke in the bag what he got, and he turned and looked at me like I had just told him to go fuck himself. This was a shiny-jacketed little mob fuck, those of the converging eyebrow, and I held my hands up, like "hey, fuck, sorry." He stalked off.

Finally, it got to me.

"Hey man," I shouted to the bag man one night over, "I Just Want to Be Your Everything", and he looked up at me. His eyes were yellowed and he smelled like rubbing alcohol and BO. He looked past me and then suddenly leaned in. I thought he was going to bite me. Fuck, I don't know why.

"Wanna see a trick?" He wheezed in my face, and I could smell him falling apart, inside. He opened his plastic bag.

He was gone by the time I uncrumpled the paper in my hand. It was one of those little notepad pages, stained with something like spaghetti sauce. I still have it.

It read:

D. Berkowitz

35 Pine Street, Yonkers, NY.

Now, I had no fucking idea who that was of course. Because that was August 9, 1977. I know this because Francis Gary Powers died that day and the woman I was dating had to write the obituary that morning and had spent an inordinate amount of time bitching about it to me.

Anyway. They busted Berkowitz outside of his apartment building on August 10, 1977. You can guess the address.

Pretty good fucking trick, huh?