On GODZILLA

January 9th

On GODZILLA
Memoirs – Part III
For the next eight years I associated with the Jewish and Latin American communist communities in New York City. I started writing freelance articles for the two communist newspapers in the city, The Little Havana Hammer and the Hebrew Sickle. All of this was under the cover of complete secrecy, according to the police I was an employee of an imaginary water treatment plant known as Water Treatment Plant 801. I had to pay off the police to keep my identity secret, we all did. We would raise money for our bribes with coffee houses where we would read poetry that were thinly disguised analogies of economic ideas. Then we would pass the hat around, also a lot of money was donated by the Irish community by mistake, because we named our coffee house events “IRA”, which stood for International Revolution Association.
My first assignment for the Little Havana Hammer was an article on sculptor Jorge Sanchez, who worked in large scale papier mache. When I interviewed him he was creating a full-scale papier mache statue of Godzilla in Central Park, and he had created a giant lizard foot that was ten feet tall. It was meant to represent capitalism, but it was never finished, and he ended up living in the foot for several years.
A few years later I got an assignment from the Hebrew Sickle to go to different factories in New Jersey and interview factory workers who moonlit as musicians. I met a chemical plant worker who played the tuba, and a textiles worker who sang falsetto. I introduced them to one another, and they became the communist community’s most popular jazz duo until they both died in a lightning storm caused by a nuclear plant in Hoboken.
Eventually I became vice-secretary of the Manhattan chapter of Comintern, after a brutal struggle with a 60-year-old Bolivian man with one eye. We both had gangs of thugs who we indoctrinated in communist theory by day and set upon each other by night. 305 men and women died in the street war until I threw the Bolivian off of a catwalk at the Metropolitan Opera House.
When I reached the age of 24 I became disillusioned with communism and started work in the mail room for Salisbury-Wigginton, an investment firm on Wall Street. I started in the basement and every year I was promoted to the floor above me, like clockwork, until I was 35 years old and the vice-president of marketing on the ninth floor.
At that time the F.B.I. had gathered enough evidence to convict me for arson and the murder of the old man in the Rockies. As they came up the elevator, my assistant Thea warned me using her extra-sensory perception, and I escaped using the back stairs. I caught a cab and traveled to Washington D.C. where I disguised myself by running for mayor. Under the pseudonym Hatter Johnson, I was mayor for three years until I had to resign as a result of a corruption scandal. It turned out that the Narcotics division had been paying Columbians to import cocaine into the city to increase the department’s budget, which was foolish because those drugs would have been imported without the illegal incentives provided by the police. I was the one who took the fall.