The Apparition of 9th Route
When the police arrived at his apartment in Greenwich Village, Paul Pannkuk didn’t know what they were talking about.
Someone had entered the apartment next door, taken a random armload of the tenant’s belongings — photo albums, a doormat, a shoe holder — and dumped it all with the garbage in the basement. The burglar was captured on security camera, and he looked an lot that is awful Mr. Pannkuk.
He told the officers no memory was had by him of the incident. He would never steal, he said.
He stood in his once-grand home that is one-bedroom with marble floors and windows onto tree-lined West Ninth Street. The home’s elegance that is former now hard to imagine.
The living room was dark, most of its lights missing. There was little furniture, and what remained was old and worn, with stuffing sprouting from holes. Newspaper clippings were stacked in tidy piles on the floor beside black-and-white family photographs. buy cocaine
On a relative side table was a sheet of paper with what looked like random doodles and reminders. In fact, it was a map of sorts for a man hopelessly lost, guideposts to his old life: “Morgan Stanley,†“Drake University,†the name of the composer of “The Music Man†(Meredith Willson). There was a verse from a child’s prayer: before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.“If I should dieâ€
Mr. Pannkuk had once lived in comfort approaching extravagance, split between the Village and the Hamptons, his future secured by a career in finance many dreamed to have in 1990s New York. He traveled the world, returning to the city to share his stories with his friends.
Most of those close friends were gone now. They have been driven by him away. At the age of 68, he was on a path many New Yorkers that is single dread. He was alone, with no one to take care of him, the occupant that is mysterious of 1A. But he was too far gone to realize what was happening. His brain no longer worked the real way it once did.cocaine online
His story is one steeped in kindness and frustration and hope misplaced, framed by addiction and a shattering accident on the eve of a start that is new. It is the tale of a recluse in plain sight, a man left to compulsively wander the place he called home. A friend gave him a title that is dubious The Phantom of Ninth Street.