Dragon Slayed, Ghosts Encountered, and a Possible Vampire

Let's start with the fire-breathing nemesis in red. The Bills have been chasing the Chiefs for most of this decade. This was the fifth straight year they met in the regular season dating to 2020, when KC beat Buffalo in an empty stadium. They would meet again in the AFC championship game on the road, the first of our three unsucessful post-season meetings. In the three years after, we've owned them in the regular season, winning all three games in their stadium, but the post-season results were loss (the dreaded "13 seconds game"), broken date (a home loss to the Bengals after the Damar Hamlin near-death incident in Cincy a few weeks earlier), and then a home loss to KC after an injury-plagued defense just couldn't stop Patrick Mahomes.

This past Sunday was their fifth straight regular season meeting, but the first in Orchard Park with fans in the stands.  KC came in with a perfect 9-0 record. The dragon threatened to slay a home team without a number of injured players at key positions. Yet somehow, on that sunny afternoon, Mahomes decided to throw his first and last passes of the game to our defenders, and our own halfway decent QB Josh Allen sealed the win with a 26-yard touchdown run that will be on highlight reels for ages.

Our reward is a scheduled week off, a possible clinch of the division and a playoff spot if Miami loses to New England this weekend, and a bunch of bragging rights that will only last if we manage to repeat the feat in the post-season against them or whoever knocks them off in an earlier playoff round.

Maybe KC lost to us this time because Taylor Swift, their most famous fangirl, didn't make the trip down the QEW from Toronto where she'd done a multinight sold-out set of concerts.  During the game, some wag posted this video, supposedly of Bills Mafia hacking her sound system during one of those shows to play the Bills fight song over her audio-
 

Watch on YouTube

- but alas, it proved to be fake, at least as to that performance.

Still, be on the lookout for "Shout! Song (Taylor's Version)."

----

Onto the ghosts, green and otherwise.

Dreams have been intense and weird in recent weeks. One was a recurrence of a relatively common one for me, that involves me finding and buying back my first-ever My Own Car. This was not the '71 Pinto I was too poor and uninsurable to actually own after freshman year of college- my sister bought that one for me just in time for me to total it a month or so later- but an even shittier Ford model from the same year known as the Maverick. I've written about this weird old rustbucket previously and even found a photo that wasn't too far off from it-



That's not mine. Color's not putrid enough, the mag wheels were nothing like the shit tires I had, and it needs a ton more rust.  I never even took a picture of the damn thing, despite buying it mainly for a newspaper job in which I had to take pictures.  I bought it for $400 from a Cornell employee, and probably spent ten to twenty times that amount fixing everything on it in the next not quite two years. Much was at the behest of shady inspection stations that wouldn't pass the Green Ghost (this was before I or we even gave cars proper names) unless I spent hundreds to replace its parking brake that I never used, or its turn signal that worked just fine if I jiggled it manually. It crapped out on my first-ever ride to Buffalo to check out the law school and went back to Ithaca with a new Basil Ford radiator that probably cost more than the car originally did.

In the Ghost's most recent subconscious appearance, I was tooling along somewhere when one of the tires blew off and I drove up on a shoulder on one of the wheel rims.  I filed that memory away until the end of another long Rochester day on Tuesday, when I again had a very late client appointment just west of the northern reaches of the city known as Charlotte (but pronounced Char-LOT). With time to kill before it, I made a stop at my favorite purveyor of music and kitsch, Record Archive.  On their new release shelf was something that almost, but not quite, reminded me of that old beast's sound system:




Vinyl coming back, I kinda get. But cassettes?  They are way more likely to degrade in quality over time if the tape doesn't just break off in the player if you even have one.  The only worse thing I could imagine making a comeback would be 8-tracks, and that is what the Green Ghost came with as an aftermarket add-on to its factory AM radio. The one in that car was permanently stuck on the third program of any tape you shoved into it; each 8-track tape had four such "programs," each with a left and right stereo track making up the eight. Fortunately, one of the few tapes I ever bought for it was the mid-70s Genesis live album "Seconds Out," recorded after Peter Gabriel left the band but when Phil Collins was still singing mostly older Pete-era material. The third "side" of the four-program tape was the entirety of their prog-rock anthem "Supper's Ready," and I played the shit out of that thing so many times I can still recite it by heart.

I bought none of those cassettes, nor vinyl nor even any new CDs there, but I did find two more odd memories to add to a recent musical collection:



That's the duo I posted about a few entries back who we saw here on the night of my birthday. At that show, I bought their most recent CD as well as a tribute album of cover songs by the dear departed musician we followed for decades and they met and married while performing in her backup band.  That was the one that it turned out I already owned, and which I then regifted to another musician friend who'd just opened for them at a Rochester show the weekend before.

These were older releases of theirs, and the weird part was seeing that they'd been autographed by the two of them and then traded in to Record Archive for a couple of bucks.  I felt like I was in an animal shelter rescuing two lost puppies. Now I want to see them again so I can get them to sign them again to us, as I've done at least one other time with an autographed find from those bins.

----

After the semi-appearance of that ghost, I headed to my two relatively late appointments. After visiting my one pro bono client at his city home, I had Siri direct me to the second one in northerner places I'd never been to before, and that took me past another ghost of my own relatively distant past.

Not quite this distant, though:



That photo is from 1912 from outside Rochester's Hickey-Freeman suit factory.  Founded there in 1899, the brand became known as the preferred menswear of presidents up to and including Obama, but with the advent of casual Fridays and reduced workforces, that factory's tie to the Hickey-Freeman brand finally met its end a little over a year ago.  Between production being cheaper in Mexico and its inner-city location being less attractive to the workforce, it was just a matter of time before it would give up, what else?, the ghost altogether. When I drove by it in the darkness of a Tuesday late afternoon, the whole plant was dark, fencing surrounding it all, but that metallic crest still visible at its North Clinton Avenue entrance. 

Even in my own Rochester time, those doors swung wide at least once a year. Right around this time of fall, Hickey-Freeman would run a "warehouse sale," putting those President-like wares on sale for the only time all year, first-come-first-serve, cash and carry and no alterations. A major portion of the male Rochester business community, including me and all of my partners, would religiously appear at the crack of dawn to queue up for the best pickings. Initially, I think either the whole event or just the first morning was by ticketed invitation only, but we Knew A Guy who always got them for the four of us. It would still run more for an off-price suit than you could get at Sibley's or (don't laugh) Sears, and I got to know a tailor near our home who'd add another hundred or so to the haul to get them fitted, but it was a rite of passage that I was probably expected to participate in to keep my place in that status-conscious organization.  In its final years before or just after I left in 1994, it was much less of a big deal, and relocated offsite to more suburban-friendly retail space in abandoned warehouses or future Spirit of Halloween storefronts. Best as I can tell, I still have one remaining trace of those trips: just the coat from a Barneys-branded suit with the Hickey-Freeman crest inside the breast pocket. At the rate I'm going, I might be able to fit into it again someday.

Following the closing announcement in 2023, the brand ran one last onsite sale at the old factory, their first in years, probably for the nostalgia as much as anything else:

When it comes to these factory sales, the once-annual events historically were greeted with great anticipation and large crowds that stretched around the block of the North Clinton Avenue facility.

“A lot of the fun part was right in the beginning,” said David O’Connell, who has been coming to these sales since the 1980s. “(You would) start talking to some people find out where they're from, and there's people from Canada, there's people from all over New York state.”

 

And people from right here in Rochester. O’Connell joined Rotoli as two of the first in line.

[Rotoli being another last-chance shopper whose parents and grandparents all worked at the factory.]

And the pair reminisced about what used to be.

“The excitement that preceded a Hickey Freeman outlet sale was significant,” Rotoli said. “You'd be talking about it with your office mates, and you'd already have a strategy of getting there, getting your coffee, and getting set up to be in line. It was a big thing.”

Rotoli arrived a half-hour before the store opened on Thursday, expecting a long line.

“And I was like, where is everybody?” he said.

Times have changed.

As they will in the old place. I later learned that a local developer is repurposing it into affordable senior housing and investing close to $2 million in one of the region's largest geothermal heating systems. The legacy will live on in the name:

Tailor Square.

----

After ending that night, as I will tonight, with some musical moments to be reported on later, I spent the in-between two nights at home with our usual evening forms of entertainment. Last night's was getting almost to the end of an Apple TV series called Bad Sisters, an adaptation by a mostly Irish cast and crew of a Danish thriller-comedy of the same basic premise: four sisters-in-law of a Really Bad Guy conspiring to relieve their sister of the pain he inflicts on all of them by trying, and repeatedly failing, to murder him. 

Series 2 of this show just dropped, unlike its main dead character who apparently can't be dropped no matter how many times they try to kill him. It splits two timelines between "months before" when John Paul is very much alive, and "present day" when, in the first scene of the series, we first see him in a coffin.

We just finished the 8th of the first season's 10 episodes, which ends with an apparent kill of JP, but with the closing credits using "You're Dead," the theme song of What We Do In The Shadows. 

Which got me thinking.... is JP actually a vampire?

Conniving, evil and narcissistic? Check.

Can't be killed by any of a number of attempted methods not involving stakes through the heart? Check.

Can't stay in his coffin after he's supposedly been killed? Check.

Spends all his time on an island? Check.

I'm asking the nobody spoil the remaining two episodes or the next season's events yet, please, but: if he escapes another predicament by screaming "BAT!" and flying out of the room, I'll have been vindicated. 

I had a previous possible vampire encounter the previous day as well, but we'll save that for another day, other than to say that the suspect in question is also named Laszlo.