Meet Bugsy: The Man Under The Floorboards
(Remember when you were a kid and you thought there were monsters in the closet....?)
As you all know, if you've been following our story, Crowbar Headquarters is cleverly disguised as a rundown apartment in an old house. As the attentive among you will also know, it's usually a pigsty. There's a high level of activity around here, staff running in and out, people whipping off one disguise to don another, Cult Abandon scribbling out manifestos on reams of scrap paper while crumpling up pages and pitching them over her shoulder, Crowbar throwing shit...generally it's not exactly organized.
Most of us just get used to living in the middle of the mess - Cake looks exhausted, saying "I work too fuckin' hard to deal with this domestic shit", Cult is apparently too "cerebral" for cleaning, Con...yeah, right, you try getting Con to make her own coffee, let alone clean up, and Crowbar...well, Crowbar's best known for demolition, not rebuilding. And we, the dedicated Crowbar Resistance Force Headquarters Mission Team (otherwise known as "Staff"), figure we don't get paid enough to take the bus, let alone clean up after these maniacs.
That said, you may remember a few nights ago when we found Crowbar unconscious in a chair, drooling on a stack of secret documents and surrounded by the detritus of weeks of obsessive reading. We took pity on her. We also had the fun job of attempting to scrape her out of the chair she seemed to be stuck to, and if you think that wasn't gross....well, even we have our limits, so we all pitched in yesterday and launched a massive Headquarters clean-up mission.
We washed, we dusted, we laundered, we even did windows. We mopped floors and, yes friends, we vacuumed. And that's about where our story gets interesting.
We mentioned HQ is situated in an old house. Most of the floors are hardwood, but if you look carefully between the cracks (as all the slats have separated) you can see gaps between the wood and the floor underneath. Well, while we were vacuuming last night, we lifted the heating grate out of the floor to vacuum inside of it. This house is old enough that the vents to the furnace are set directly into the floor and have the old fashioned iron "lattice-work" grates on top. Not bolted in, mind you. Not anchored in any way, really, except that they fit pretty well into those big holes in the floor.
So there we were, with the grate pulled out, vacuuming inside the heating duct, running the hose along the edge, when we noticed what looked like a slip of paper being sucked out from the space between the hardwood layer of floor and the stuff underneath. Just a corner, at first, but we saw it. At first we ignored it 'cause that's what we do with random slips of paper around here - we ignore them and hope someone else will pick them up. Then we remembered this was a Cleaning Mission, so we turned the vacuum back on it, hoping to suck it out from between the two layers of flooring. Honestly, we figured it was an old receipt or something. [Crowbar seems to think filing receipts means dropping them in random places and trying to scoop the majority of them up come April. Seeing as this entire operation is underground and we're not exactly writing off our shoe phones and lapel cameras, we don't usually worry about it too much either.]
What came out was an absolutely filthy, folded piece of heavy paper. When we unfolded it, expecting to see purple cash register ink, instead we saw what looked like a very old photo:
As you can see, this looks an awful lot like somebody's mugshot, except there are no numbers identifying him. Did cops always use those number plates, back in the old days? The paper is very old photo paper, we noticed after unfolding it, so it seems to be original, albeit awfully hard to date. Who is this man? What is his folded mugshot doing underneath our Headquarters floor? How many years ago was this taken? Was it deliberately hidden there, or did it just fall out of someone's pocket while they were laying the hardwood? What else might be concealed under the floorboards? (CB Staff Note: that particular question has forced us to keep a close eye on Crowbar, as she keeps prowling around staring raptly at the floor, while carrying - you guessed it - a crowbar.)
As you can see, this little mystery has our curiousity pretty peaked. We've conjured up all kinds of elaborate, romanticized stories to explain this, and some of them are pretty fantastic. Buddy here looks like he could have been a member of Capone's crew (but that might just be because he's wearing a tie). Either way, we're fascinated to think that he's been here for the whole 14 years Crowbar Headquarters has been using this house as a cover. Goes to show you just how bad Crowbar's housekeeping skills really are.
Of course, there could be some ridiculously mundane explanation for his presence. This might not be a real photo at all, it could be a posed shot as part of someone's Halloween costume or something. This guy even looks vaguely like someone Crowbar knew long ago on another mission, and he was the kind of guy who had no higher aspiration than to be mistaken for one of the Kray brothers. Maybe this picture is just a leftover prop from one of his fantasies of being a crime lord that managed to wiggle its way into the heating duct, along with so many other scraps of useless paper.
Maybe. But that won't stop us from coming up with far more interesting scenarios. Watch this space regularly for news of the Crowbar Resistance Force Headquarters Ghost, a man who was gunned down fighting the coppers and subsequently broke out of the Kingston pen to flee the country with the loot from a bank robbery under his arm......
As you all know, if you've been following our story, Crowbar Headquarters is cleverly disguised as a rundown apartment in an old house. As the attentive among you will also know, it's usually a pigsty. There's a high level of activity around here, staff running in and out, people whipping off one disguise to don another, Cult Abandon scribbling out manifestos on reams of scrap paper while crumpling up pages and pitching them over her shoulder, Crowbar throwing shit...generally it's not exactly organized.
Most of us just get used to living in the middle of the mess - Cake looks exhausted, saying "I work too fuckin' hard to deal with this domestic shit", Cult is apparently too "cerebral" for cleaning, Con...yeah, right, you try getting Con to make her own coffee, let alone clean up, and Crowbar...well, Crowbar's best known for demolition, not rebuilding. And we, the dedicated Crowbar Resistance Force Headquarters Mission Team (otherwise known as "Staff"), figure we don't get paid enough to take the bus, let alone clean up after these maniacs.
That said, you may remember a few nights ago when we found Crowbar unconscious in a chair, drooling on a stack of secret documents and surrounded by the detritus of weeks of obsessive reading. We took pity on her. We also had the fun job of attempting to scrape her out of the chair she seemed to be stuck to, and if you think that wasn't gross....well, even we have our limits, so we all pitched in yesterday and launched a massive Headquarters clean-up mission.
We washed, we dusted, we laundered, we even did windows. We mopped floors and, yes friends, we vacuumed. And that's about where our story gets interesting.
We mentioned HQ is situated in an old house. Most of the floors are hardwood, but if you look carefully between the cracks (as all the slats have separated) you can see gaps between the wood and the floor underneath. Well, while we were vacuuming last night, we lifted the heating grate out of the floor to vacuum inside of it. This house is old enough that the vents to the furnace are set directly into the floor and have the old fashioned iron "lattice-work" grates on top. Not bolted in, mind you. Not anchored in any way, really, except that they fit pretty well into those big holes in the floor.
So there we were, with the grate pulled out, vacuuming inside the heating duct, running the hose along the edge, when we noticed what looked like a slip of paper being sucked out from the space between the hardwood layer of floor and the stuff underneath. Just a corner, at first, but we saw it. At first we ignored it 'cause that's what we do with random slips of paper around here - we ignore them and hope someone else will pick them up. Then we remembered this was a Cleaning Mission, so we turned the vacuum back on it, hoping to suck it out from between the two layers of flooring. Honestly, we figured it was an old receipt or something. [Crowbar seems to think filing receipts means dropping them in random places and trying to scoop the majority of them up come April. Seeing as this entire operation is underground and we're not exactly writing off our shoe phones and lapel cameras, we don't usually worry about it too much either.]
What came out was an absolutely filthy, folded piece of heavy paper. When we unfolded it, expecting to see purple cash register ink, instead we saw what looked like a very old photo:
As you can see, this looks an awful lot like somebody's mugshot, except there are no numbers identifying him. Did cops always use those number plates, back in the old days? The paper is very old photo paper, we noticed after unfolding it, so it seems to be original, albeit awfully hard to date. Who is this man? What is his folded mugshot doing underneath our Headquarters floor? How many years ago was this taken? Was it deliberately hidden there, or did it just fall out of someone's pocket while they were laying the hardwood? What else might be concealed under the floorboards? (CB Staff Note: that particular question has forced us to keep a close eye on Crowbar, as she keeps prowling around staring raptly at the floor, while carrying - you guessed it - a crowbar.)
As you can see, this little mystery has our curiousity pretty peaked. We've conjured up all kinds of elaborate, romanticized stories to explain this, and some of them are pretty fantastic. Buddy here looks like he could have been a member of Capone's crew (but that might just be because he's wearing a tie). Either way, we're fascinated to think that he's been here for the whole 14 years Crowbar Headquarters has been using this house as a cover. Goes to show you just how bad Crowbar's housekeeping skills really are.
Of course, there could be some ridiculously mundane explanation for his presence. This might not be a real photo at all, it could be a posed shot as part of someone's Halloween costume or something. This guy even looks vaguely like someone Crowbar knew long ago on another mission, and he was the kind of guy who had no higher aspiration than to be mistaken for one of the Kray brothers. Maybe this picture is just a leftover prop from one of his fantasies of being a crime lord that managed to wiggle its way into the heating duct, along with so many other scraps of useless paper.
Maybe. But that won't stop us from coming up with far more interesting scenarios. Watch this space regularly for news of the Crowbar Resistance Force Headquarters Ghost, a man who was gunned down fighting the coppers and subsequently broke out of the Kingston pen to flee the country with the loot from a bank robbery under his arm......
posted by Crowbar at 9:21 a.m.
1 Comments:
At first I thought I'd ask CB if she *really* found that photo...but then I realized that I know her well enough to know that this is a true story....and a very interesting one at that. I found horsehair insulation in the wall of my place once....cool, but not as mysterious...especially when I found out that horsehair is in fact still used as insulation. (Geez, and I thought maybe my crooked house was historic or somethin'....)
xoxox J
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