This next one is by David A. Banks, author of The City Authentic, double guest on TrueAnon, and, presumably, a Food Hall Lobster Roll connoseiur at this point. ENJOY - BB
In 2009 I was not ready to graduate college. Not emotionally but more importantly, not logistically. It was The Great Recession, I lived in Florida, and while my academic abilities had thrust me to the finish line there was nothing but an abyss of unemployment waiting for me.
The house I grew up in was dirty. It is still dirty but I don’t live there anymore. No one does. It just sits there, rotting in the South Florida sun to this day with many of my childhood possessions in it. When I lived there, I would make occasional vain attempts to clean it by running a decade-old Kirby vacuum cleaner across the compacted forest green carpet. The vacuum, heavy with a full bag I didn’t know how to change and an all-metal construction that didn’t know when to quit, must have left some sort of impression on me. When I started trawling Craigslist for a job—any job—I responded to an add looking for Kirby vacuum cleaner salesmen.
I got in my Toyota Yaris (still miss that car) and drove to a half-abandoned commercial park in unincorporated Sarasota County. There I watched a middle-aged woman on a tiny stage sell a vacuum cleaner to an audience of potential vacuum cleaner salesmen, saleswomen, and nonbinary sales personnel. This Kirby loyalist even pulled out a Dyson vacuum that looked as though it had been roughed up in the parking lot and insisted that the Kirby (which we would sell door-to-door for $2000 if memory serves) could pick up what this trendy vacuum could not.
One morning, as I was contemplating becoming an Arthur Miller character, an ex girlfriend called and told me the law office she worked for was hiring. It was part time work but enough. This was a small firm that specialized in representing homeowners’ associations and business was booming. All of the houses and condos bought with subprime loans were being foreclosed on They needed someone like me to write letters on behalf of Green Acres Phase II Homeowners Association or similarly named clients to poor schmucks going through bankruptcy and let them know that they still owed $600 for lawn maintenance. It was probably the worst thing I have ever done for money.
I tried to reconcile the evil things I did for money on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with my unpaid internship (it was the style at the time) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On those days I worked for the Sarasota County planning department. They’d just hired a planner of some repute whose remit was to make the suburban landscape a bit more walkable and transit friendly. I was the body man for this deeply weird guy who could make himself fall asleep almost instantly for five minutes at a time. It was incredible to watch.
My boss at the law office, let’s call him Dan, also lead a little outfit called CONTROL GROWTH NOW! It mainly existed as a newsletter that he printed (full color!) on the office printer and sent out to his followers. Dan was a militant NIMBY who wanted to put a halt to apartments, roundabouts, and anything else that stank of cosmopolitan city life. Really anything that was not a 2,000 square foot single family home 20 minutes’ driving distance from a shopping plaza was anathema to him. His arch enemy was my other boss at the planning department. In the year and change that I worked for both of these men, my real, third job was making sure they did not know I worked for the other. I succeeded for a good long while but when Dan —newsletters in hand— came to a community meeting he saw me setting up the tables and the jig was up. I wasn’t fired or reprimanded, they actually tried to get me to stay instead of moving north and starting grad school. I suppose my typing speed was more valuable than ideological loyalty. Or maybe he thought he could turn me.
Dan was a crank. I couldn’t appreciate it then, and though I still don’t approve of his law-based lifestyle, he did teach me the importance of cranks. A crank provides the necessary friction in decision-making that forces bureaucrats to explain themselves. Any would-be Eugene Van Haussman (that’s the guy that bulldozed Paris for Napoleon and built the one that stands today) needs his ego and pride whittled down by another insane person. Good government needs cranks. Every city and town needs a few cranks. The world needs cranks.
The figure of the crank is someone with a dedication to a cause or a grudge that is impossible to resolve under normal circumstances. Dan will never CONTROL GROWTH NOW, or tomorrow, or ever. All cities are designed to grow. If they don't, their books go sideways and they die. People move to the next place where the taxes are lower and Crumbl Cookie shops blossom across the landscape like mushrooms after the rain.
I have endeavored to be as much of a crank as my professional and social obligations will allow. So far, so good I would say. Take, for example, my unending efforts to figure out what’s going on with COB, Inc. Years ago about half a dozen of us wanted to map out all the Italian and Irish families in the area who have given generations of their sons to the Troy Police Department. The Comitales, for example, included Dominick who assaulted a little league coach and his uncle John who was convicted of warrantless home searches after his own son narc’ed on him. There were stories of entire neighborhoods wary of the reputation of men with the same last name for the better part of the twentieth century. There’s also plenty of funny stuff. Like the time Justin Ashe almost shot his own dick off in the bathroom. His dad was the police chief of nearby Hoosick Falls until he caught a grand larceny conviction for stealing confiscated fireworks.
In the course of that research, we came across a story about a Rensselaer County jail guard that plead guilty to tax fraud in 2013. His name is Mark A. Piche and he had been pilfering funds from the prison guards’ labor union and underreporting wages at a pizza shop he owned. The pizza shop is, according to its website, part of COB, Inc. COB is an acronym for one of their specialties: Cheese on Bottom pizza. I have sampled it and am confident in saying it is Not My Thing. Piche sold the business in 2019 to long-time manager Frannie Agostine who had no problem securing a $10,000 PPP loan the next year.
Frannie seems like a nice person. When you search her name, you see that she was bestowed the title of “Person of the Year” by the local CYO chapter at our Italian Community Center alongside police officers getting similar awards. She’s got photos partying with all the conservative local politicians. Everyone is smiling. And the pizza business seems to be thriving. They’ve since opened a second location in Clifton Park which, NXIVM founder Keith Raniere called the “Rome of modern day” in the HBO docuseries The Vow. No small feat!
But what keeps me obsessed with COB, Inc. is that when you look up the business address on file with the state of New York you don’t get either of the pizza shops. Instead, you get the address for Epione Massages which sits next to a gas station outside of Schenectady. In classic massage parlor fashion, the windows are covered up with signs displaying their phone number and website. The website works and you can reserve an hour-long massage for $80.
The only name attached to the incorporation papers for COB, Inc. is a Gloria Parks, who lists an Albany address. There’s a LinkedIn profile of someone with the same name who has worked at Empire Corporate and Information Services, Inc. a provider of registered agent and corporate filing and document retrieval services. ECIS’s address is just a few doors down from Gloria’s.
With the documents not giving me much else to go on, I drove out to Epione but being in front of the building didn’t tell me much else. It looked closed. I looked up Epione on Wikipedia and found out it was the name of a “minor health goddess.” Strange to name the place after a Greek god extended universe character. I would have expected the namesake to be Roman. I wasn’t ready to book a massage or try anything else. At least not that day.
On my way back I passed the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory where they design and build the nuclear reactors for our Navy’s ships then pulled over in a nearby posh neighborhood. I parked my car on the street and walked a couple hundred feet to merge into a scrum of people opposite the entrance to Forts Ferry Farm.
Forts Ferry Farm is only sort of a farm; it is definitely not a ferry nor does it have a fort. It is more of an outdoor wedding and reception venue. It is owned in part by Emma Hearst, the daughter of George Hearst, the owner of my hometown newspaper, the Times Union. He probably owns your newspaper too. The reporters of the Times Union are represented by the Albany News Guild, but they haven’t had a contract for 17 years. That’s a long time. And that’s what we chanted as Audis and Aston Martin’s rolled into Forts Ferry Farm for a fancy party hosted by George and Emma. At one point, we got into a yelling match with Emma who had rolled up in a side-by-side along with a guy taking photos. She told us she worked in the service industry for a long time. We didn’t understand what that had to do with anything. I vogued for the camera which the guy seemed to enjoy a lot.
Rich, cruel idiots bilking professional reporters for close to two decades is why we need cranks more than ever. They’re a poor substitute for a healthy fourth estate but they can get the job done. You (yes, you!) can be a crank tomorrow, no matter where you are. Indeed, it is better if you don’t live in a big city, which may still have journalists and storied cranks. To paraphrase a Andrew Jackson Jihad song, sure, you could be a pussy and move to Portland or New York, or you could stay and be a crank in the place that you were born. I didn’t do that, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, but I didn’t move to a big city either.
And down here, in the small cities and towns there are tons of criminals getting away with all sorts of terrible things. Maybe you can’t change professions and become a journalist (George Hearst doesn’t want to pay you to be one anyway.) but anyone can spend their off hours being a crank. We can be titillated and disgusted by the Epsteins and Trumps of the world, but there’s someone that lives closer to you with all the same opinions and appetites that has never been touched by daylight. All across this country is a fractal of rats’ nests, each smaller one recreating the larger, better-known ones. No matter how far down you go there will be the same dark pattern of graft, violence, and corruption. All it takes is a crank—a happy warrior for the truth—to keep looking and keep pressing. Did I ever mention the name of those pizza parlors? They’re called Red Front.