While performing in Hamlet in New York, I stopped into Macy’s and saw a display for a new board game – The Game of Shakespeare.The demonstrator was a charming elderly actor with white beard and ascot – Commander Whitehead’s doppelgänger. We chatted about the Bard and the Biz. He had performed on Broadway decades before with Louis Calhern, Maurice Evans, Eva LeGallienne and Judith Anderson – top Shakespeareans all. I was careful not to allude to the disparity in our current positions but he was clearly devastated by that bitter reality. I wondered if he would survive the weekend.
“Please, God,” I prayed “shoot me before I become him.”
I worked in a mailroom with an actor who had been a stand-in for many of the close-harmony groups of the 1950s – The Four Freshmen, The Four Lads, The Four Aces, The Four Preps, The Four This, The Four That. People didn’t know what those singers looked like so it was easy to slip in a sub. His closet had been stuffed with plaid sports coats and college letter-sweaters. He had also been a busy jingle-singer on the radio. In the 1940s and ’50s, radio programs would broadcast live from New York then wait three hours for the time change and perform again for the West Coast. During those three-hour breaks, bored singers drank. He was bored. He drank away his wife, his voice, his career. He was twice my age and, like me, working for the minimum wage.
“Please, God,” I prayed, “shoot me before I become him.”
Luckily, I had become a Shakespearean scholar while sitting on the stoop
I met Don in 1969 in an off-off-Broadway theater buried in a supermarket basement on the lower West Side. The proximity of the stage to food made it a magnet to the largest cockroaches East of the Sun and West of 8th avenue. We actors developed the ability to smash the creepy critters mid-soliloquy without breaking our iambic pentameter rhythm or the audience noticing.
To be or not to be,
STOMP
That is the question.
It was my first acting job. I landed it right after I landed in New York from Milwaukee, Wisconsin where I’d been evading military induction, aka the Draft. I touched down; bought a showbiz paper at the first newsstand I passed and saw this audition notice –
Spear-carriers needed for Macbeth
No Pay
Again, my years of Shakespearean scholarship on the stoop paid dividends.
Like Gene Kelly in an MGM musical, I raced to the theater with luggage in hand. I’d like to say it was a straw suitcase but it was a duffel bag. I’d like to say I auditioned on a large stage facing red velvet seats but it was in a filthy hallway facing cases of Velveeta cheese. I’d like to say I auditioned for David Merrick but it was for Mark Fink. I’d like to say I had his undivided attention but he read his mail. I’d like to say he wasn’t a married queer on the prowl but he was.
Fink leered to me that I had a touch of genius but that we must keep that a secret lest it spread jealousy in the ranks of the spear-carriers. He used the same line on all the spear-carriers. And, you’ll notice it’s the same line used by Professor Pervowitz. But, unlike that creep, Fink never asked me to masturbate at his feet while saying I was his bitch-slut-cunt. Fink just tried to suck my cock. When I resisted, he reverted to that hackneyed homo ploy, “What are you afraid of finding out?”
Hmmnn… maybe there’s a Showbiz Scumbag College where they learn these seduction techniques.
Don and I were political junkies – he far Left, me far Right. He loved sparring with me and I loved being told that I was the only 19-year-old he’d ever met who could quote Calvin Coolidge. Since Don had worked as a newsman in Washington and New York, he was full of “what really happened” stories of major historical events. And, since he was gay, he gave me the lowdown on which celebrities and politicians of yesteryear had been on the downlow. He also clued me to the fact that homosexuality was endemic in the worlds of espionage and intelligence.
Calvin Coolidge – the greatest American President you never heard of
Don was the annoying type who did The New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. No mistakes. He was a whizz at all word games. No surprise that during World War Two, he worked in the cryptography unit of the US Army. But, he didn’t spend much time code breaking. Turns out, Don could do a brilliant imitation of President Roosevelt that Army intelligence exploited.
FDR or Don? You decide.
India was on the fence in World War Two because it wanted independence from the British Empire. It’s a little-known fact that a sizable Indian army fought for the Axis against Britain. But, the Indian people loved FDR. So, every day, Don read Allied propaganda to India over the radio doing his best impersonation of FDR. He never said that he was FDR but he sure sounded like him. The hope was that giving the Indians a daily dose of FDR’s smarmy, fireside-chat charm could turn the tide in the Allies’ favor. Even Don didn’t know if or how much this trick worked.
Consider, if you will, the abiding power of scatological humor, a power that spans centuries, continents and races. I enter as irrefutable evidence of this anthropological connection the fact that the first joke I was told involved a member of America’s indigenous peoples – Chief Bowels-No-Move. The hapless redskin was constipated until he swallowed a laxative with immediate, spectacular results. The Chief had to move house (and pronto) because his tee-pee was “all full of poo.”
No wonder he’s angry!
In fact, careful deconstruction of a “dirty” or “blue” joke reveals that though the pragmatics, semantics and syntactics of a given joke do not change with time, their punch line inevitably coarsens. I learned this in 1969 from a much older actor on my first acting job. He would stop me whenever I began to tell a dirty joke. He would then write down what he was sure was going to be my punch line. When I’d finished telling my joke, he’d reveal what he’d written down. He was never wrong. He had heard my jokes in 1909 from men who had heard them in 1869 and so on back to the dawn of smut.
Speedy Gonzales embodying the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, culture and humor.
Here is a demonstration of both the coarsening of a punchline and the ubiquitous anthropological element of blue humor using the evergreen “Speedy Gonzales” joke as template.
Scene: In a dark, hotel room, an American tourist unwittingly pushes his finger into the rectum of Speedy Gonzales while the notorious Mexican bandito is screwing the gringo’s wife. The irritated Speedy responds thusly –
1909 punch line: “Please, Señor, you are hurting me.”
1969 punch line: “Señor, take your finger out of my ass.”
Don, my older, joke-meister friend pointed out that the charming subtlety of the earlier version had been lost. And, he felt sure this was emblematic of the cheapening of our entire culture.
Like most boys, certainly Brooklyn stoop-boys, I had an early fascination with excrement. I especially loved poo jokes – most boys do. It’s not pathological and it passes. (See, I’m an adult now and didn’t draw your attention to that cheap pun.) But, there are male children, mercifully few in number, who display early signs of an unhealthy fixation with the natural, nay, essential bodily function of evacuation. As example, allow me to present –
The Case of the Catholic Coprophile
The Adventures of Zorro is the big TV hit of 1957-59. Zorro is the Robin Hood of Old California. Our hero uses his glistening rapier to carve his calling card – a large Z– into the bark of trees, the walls of haciendas and the bellies of his enemies. Every Brooklyn kid wants a Zorro mask, cape and sword. Spoiled kids have all three. The rest of us improvise or beat up the spoiled kids for their Zorro booty.
One boy in St. John the Pederast Primary School is painting large Zs all over the school walls – with his excrement. (It must be a boy because girls and nuns would not do this.) When I say all over, I mean, all over. The young defacer is a genius of product placement. You cannot miss his mark. “Mr. Maximum Visibility.” On some walls, he writes a simple Z; on other walls ZORRO. But, time and quantity of material permitting, he writes Zorro Was Here adding a large, insouciant Z under that for good measure.
But, why? When? How? We students are almost never allowed out of our classrooms alone. Could the demented graffiti artist be our hunchback janitor who looks like Quasimodo and wears an immense, Johnny-Ray-style hearing aid? (Several years later, he is caught spying on little girls in the toilet – echoes of Quasimodo and Esmeralda.) Is he a secret coprophile using the Zorro brand as clever cover for his twisted desire to take revenge on the world by smearing his hunchback dung on school walls? Does he derive still more perverse pleasure from having to remove his own caked-on filth?
I am to stand guard at the entrance to the Mat Room – a small room with a wrestling mat on the floor and… well… that’s all. I guess if the sophisticates in attendance aren’t in the mood to “party down” of an evening they can hold a tag-team match. But, I must enforce the strict “couples only” policy; namely – if one-half of a couple leaves the Mat Room the other must follow. This is to avoid an unbalanced male/female ratio of swingers. However, Mat Room etiquette does allow for consensual gangbangs. So, I will be janitor, bouncer and Poet-In-Residence in this bordello. No problemo. My resumé attests to the fact that I am man enough for all three jobs.
Wait a minute, you’re my wife!
I will also be tasked with tidying up the “Adam and Eve Rooms.” These airless closets are barely large enough to hold a mattress, an ashtray on the mattress and a bare, red light bulb hanging over the mattress. Once Adam and Eve have left their closet Eden and retired to the disco to feast on the sumptuous buffet nightly, it will be my appointed task to squeeze into the cramped closet, squeeze a clean sheet onto the mattress and squeeze a few squirts of Air-Wick into the now funky air to restore its paradisiacal aroma. Oops. Almost forgot. Have to empty the ashtray.
In the 1980s, Evian was the #1 bottled water in New York. #2 wasn’t even close. But, #2’s new Sales Manager was determined to kick Evian’s ass – maybe since Evian had just fired his ass. I was hired as one of his ass-kickers. My job was to visit delis and bodegas all over Manhattan and persuade the owners to give #2 more shelf-space. (In the retail food racket, shelf-space is the name of the game!)
In every store I visited, the enormity of my task became apparent. Evian bottles were prominently displayed at eye-level on the shelves while my brand wasn’t.
Oh, wait, here they are, way down here at back-breaking, floor level.
My brand’s bottles were buried down in the cockroach graveyard.
There is no more stomach-turning sight in a food store than flies and roaches pushing up daisies. A Londoner asked me why I always washed the top of soda cans before opening them. “Ah, the survival behavior of a native New Yorker,” I explained. “You see, cockroaches lay their eggs on can tops – don’t ask me why – and their eggs roll into that small depression around the can top. If I swallow a roach egg, it will grow inside me like the Alien. I have never seen a cockroach in my many years in London but I still wash my can tops.”
Evian was a big moneymaker for the storeowners and #2 was a big waste of time. How welcome do you think I was on a scorching summer day? How much time do you think they wanted to devote to my tedious survey questions when they had a long line of impatient joggers waiting to pay for their Evian?
My agent finally found my phone number and told me he had a friend who managed the leading male strip show of the era – The Plantagenets. Its current Master of Ceremonies had lost his voice (as had every previous MC) due to the impossible task of screaming over the screaming women in attendance. But, this MC gig had definite merits –
Very good money
Very good money – in cash
Only four shows a week
Late show times so I could do a play and then do the strip show – not that I had any hopes of being in a play
Problem was that after one night of non-stop screaming I’d have no vocal cords to do a play with for the rest of my natural life. Another problem was that The Plantagenets’ show was crap. But, the main problem was that the MC had to not only scream but also scream whilst on roller skates and scream stinko jokes like –
“Ladies, our next gorgeous hunk of man is a Jewish butcher’s son from Brooklyn and believe me that meat is all kosher!”
“Girls, this Italian Stallion says his favorite pastime is playing hide the salami.”
But, I was hungry for a bit of salami myself, kosher or otherwise, so I agreed to catch the show. I immediately realized that the women had whipped themselves into a lather before the first man had unzipped his first zipper. And, that lather had nothing to do with what was happening on stage. And, what was happening on stage was surprisingly tame – no full nudity, just a succession of oiled men with fake tans wearing dumb costumes, dancing awkwardly and stripping clumsily. (Imagine the Village People spazzing around in their jocks.)
Women at male strip shows get touchier than Joe Biden at a Girl Scout jamboree.
Naïve me later learned that the real action happened backstage where desperate women paid for the privilege of blowing the strippers. (In our still coarser age, young ladies don’t bother to retire backstage to get “up close and personal” with their favorite danseurs érotiques.They blow the strippers right on stage in front of their cheering girlfriends.)
In those golden days of yesteryear, there were strict codes of conduct in porn theaters and dirty bookstores. In the latter, it was thought rude to pick up a porn magazine immediately after another sticky-fingered voyeur had put it down. The girl in that magazine was still his girl. It was best to let some time pass and allow the couple to come to terms with their recent break-up. Then you were free to paw over Teenage Enema Bandits.
Only well-behaved swingers need apply
In porn cinemas, as in all cinemas, it was held inconsiderate, threatening and sexually provocative to sit right next to, directly in front of or (worse) directly behind someone when there were other seats available. It pains me to report that some lost souls went to porn theaters expressly to jack-off or to be jacked-off. I was never among their number. My preference was to sit far apart, all the better to enjoy the mise en scène. And, to avoid being hit by recklessly extruded seminal fluid.
Porn theaters, like strip-shows, were remarkably somber affairs. The men hunkered down to watch and/or wank in silence. No chitchat. No popcorn passing. Definitely no eye contact. You didn’t want to risk being recognized.
“Murray, what the hell are you doing here?”
Furthermore, a wisp too much eye-contact with the flaming Black fairies who walked up and down the center aisle, licking their lips while looking into laps, might suggest you were happy to let them get a lip-lock on your love-monkey. No. And again, no! Eyes straight ahead.
Boy Outa Brooklyn 