Black Books-Chapter Nine

A fictional account of life in MAGAritaville.

Donald Trump’s eponymous tower rose like a giant spike through the heart of Fifth Avenue, rising out of the rubble of the classic Bonwit Teller building.

A legendary store he sought fit to destroy in the middle of the night with undocumented, non-union, Polish labor.

“That’ll teach those fucking labor unions,” he excitedly spit into the phone in the backseat of his father’s limousine, “and those crazy Poles did it without even wearing hardhats and gloves - and for only four bucks an hour!”

The budding real estate mogul couldn’t believe his good fortune and said as much to his mentor, Roy Cohn, who was on the other end of his call - as he was most mornings - counseling his brash, young mentee on the art of breaking rules and getting away with it.

Trump stiffed the workers on the back-end as he was wont to do, one of the many lessons he learned from his old man.

Cohn would find himself on the receiving end of Trump’s petty ways but that was still a few years off - where the thanks received for his years of tutelage would be a fake gold watch and a brush on his death bed.

Sure Trump had to settle years later with the Polish workers for an even million - to get out of yet another lawsuit - but it was worth it to destroy those damn friezes alone.

“They smashed those fucking friezes into a million pieces Roy!”

The uppity pricks at the Met wanted ‘em but he would rather raze the whole goddamn building than acquiesce to culture.

Especially anything to do with the arts.  He despised the arts; opera, theater, he could see no value in any of it because it wasn’t about him.

If a painting didn’t have him in it he didn’t want to see it.

The Trumps were a flamboyantly uncultured people, with the tastes and temperament of a tropical drug lord.

For Donald this was especially true and in more ways than one.

He gleefully demolished the Bonwit Teller building; wanting to break everything that store represented - a society in which he and his parents would never really belong.

It was personal to him, as was everything else that motivated him in business and building.

Eleanor Roosevelt attended the grand store’s opening around the same time Trump’s mother was coming to this country on a boat from Scotland, to work as a maid.  Something there was of course no shame in but Trump sought to hide from in his biography, reinventing a newer myth of the Trump clan as some sort of American royalty.

Hell, his grandfather even changed the family name from Drumpf, building a liquor and brothel business in the Pacific Northwest before his offspring staked their claim on the American dream in Jamaica Estates, Queens.

It would be easier for the delusional and drug-addled scion to pretend his roots were all of the finest lineage and that he was now the king of New York City.

A massive tower he would ‘build’ to usher in a new era, a shiny tribute to ‘new money’, a gleaming phallus made erect by a toxic infusion of Reagan-era deregulation and public corruption; a monument, in a way, to the 1980’s themselves.

If greed itself had an address it would be Trump Tower - he would see to it.

It would not be filled with Ivy League blue bloods, with their snooty co-op boards and country club pedigrees.

Donald would sell condos for cash to guys named Sergei who didn’t ask any questions and made the purchases through anonymous LLCs.

Just the way he liked it.

If there was an innovation in New York City real estate that Trump could claim as his own this was it.

Now, forty years later, he would rather chop off his own little fingers than sell it - which is exactly what the New York A.G. tried to force him into earlier this spring.  That damn woman, who he liked to call ‘Peekaboo’, could not, would not, win in his mind.

He’d burn the whole place to the ground first - and since he never put in a sprinkler system it wouldn’t be that hard.  Hell, he still knew a couple of guys from Bayridge that would be happy to do it.

He laughed to himself as he walked over to the windows, looking down at the people below, teeming like ants under his gaze.

Trump caught a bit of his reflection as he pondered his next move.

He WAS older now - no amount of orange concealer and hair dye could hide it.

A few drops of rain fell on the glass and slid down over his reflection.

A stand-in for the tears that he could no longer shed.  Anger and retribution had consumed his broken psyche but for a moment he caught a glimpse of the fear and self-doubt he spent a lifetime trying to bury.

Deep down he knew he had become an awful person, maybe understood he always was one.

Too many miles past redemption to truly care about anything in this world besides himself.

The only satisfaction - the only ‘winning’ he could feel - was if somebody else suffered.

He remembered the first time he looked out of this window.  His penthouse had just been finished; Trump added ten phantom stories to make his building the tallest in Midtown if by floor numbers only.  It was of course a lie but so was everything else about his life.

It almost didn’t get built - thanks to the Teamsters and their strike in the summer of ’82.

Nobody to drive the fucking cement trucks.

He nearly lost his ass before his dream had even begun but his mob buddies bailed him out.

He had to give the Teamster boss of Local 282, John Cody, a free fucking apartment for his mistress - on ‘Fat’ Tony Salerno’s orders - to make the concrete start flowing again.

In the end everybody got a piece - that’s how business was done in those days.   

Trump tried to wire the apartment for sound when the new owner moved in but Cody got wind of it; the moll knew better and wouldn’t let Trump’s guys inside.

She was no fool - and nobody trusted Donald - the mob could tell a snake and a rat better than most.

Trump’s cover was setting up ‘the phone lines’ in the new apartment but phone guys don’t wear silk suits; when the Genevose family got wind of Donald’s stunt he was out.

He didn’t care, throwing his allegiance in with the Gambinos instead.

Donald’s dad had warned him when he struck out on his own in Manhattan, that it was not their territory.

Fred Trump Sr. had a comfortable and cushy thing going with his working class apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, laundering a little cash for his Italian friends on the side.

He knew his place and how to keep his head down, mostly.

His son, not so much.

Donald admired the style of  their up-and-coming, and soon to be new boss, John Gotti; a man who, much like himself, craved the spotlight and seemed to reflect the booming new era in NYC both men were not only prospering in but in a perverse way defining.

They were bling before it was a thing.

Both often prominently featured in the New York Post.  All was well with their new partnership, especially with John Gotti’s consigliere Sammy the Bull.

Until so many Russians moved into Trump Tower that Trump’s allegiances had to shift or else.

Donald, being a frequent visitor to the brothels and poker dens that began to dot the lower floors of the building, knew the Russians were the future.

He didn’t gamble but had a voracious appetite for vice and collecting dirt on his associates - who he would happily send down to be ‘entertained’ by his buildings occupants ‘on the house’.

The new guys didn’t want a bunch of Italians hanging around and proved to be far more ruthless and adept at freely trading insider info than Cosa Nostra.  They seemed to have no real code unlike the Omertà the old guard lived by.

He fed his crooked and well-placed pal, Rudy Giuliani, enough intel to make the knee-capping of the ‘Five Families’ fairly easy - and pave the way for a much more savage cartel that the two men would come to serve for decades to come.

Neither at the time had the foresight to see how far it would lead - or that the barely literate Trump would go on to become President of the United States with the aid of Putin himself.

They were as crooked as the day was long, especially Rudy, who perhaps pulled off an even greater con on the public than Trump when he became known as ‘America’s Mayor’ after 9/11.

A title he never deserved and a most execrable man - who benefited from a nation’s shock and good P.R. more than any actual accomplishment or heroism.

Rudy made a small fortune off of that title for nearly two decades after that horrible and fateful day - until he became a full time day-drinker and shill for Russian disinformation.

Rudy had always been a scumbag - and Donald had leveraged that defect for decades to get out of scrapes with the Feds or NYPD.

During Trump’s first term he would show up at the restaurant in Trump’s D.C. hotel and commandeer a table around 11 a.m.; he even put out a little name plate, holding court well into the afternoon until he got too sloshed to speak.

The hotel was both another Trump kompromat factory and a way for foreign governments to put bribe money directly into Donald’s pockets by booking blocks of over-priced hotel rooms and enduring dinners with the flatulent, wanna-be dictator in its restaurant.

At one such dinner early into his first term, a new waiter who completed the task of bringing a diet coke in a small glass bottle to then President Trump on a silver platter and opening it in front of him - a standing rule in any of the clubs he owned - made the mistake of serving the shrimp cocktail that Donald begins every meal with improperly.

He served the rest of the guests the same sized shrimp as Donald himself.

A completely unacceptable oversight in the eyes of the man with the world’s most fragile ego.

The server was fired - and for the rest of his term the hotel chef flew in giant tiger prawns to be served to Donald - while his dinner companions made do with regular 16/20 count crustaceans.

It was the appetizer equivalent of making the chairs in front of your desk smaller than yours - so you can peer down at your invitees from a greater height.  Another move Trump employed for decades in his NYC office.

Trump’s staff came to despise him with the same vigor as anyone else who truly knows the man.

Most especially those who worked in the hospitality division of his many failed businesses.

In truth, the Trumps were always much more invested in the hostility business.

In essence, he was the world’s most inhospitable man.