boyoutabrooklyn

Oxnard Mon Amour

rundown mini trailer home. — **Home! Sweet home!**

While working in the security-guard game, I was living in a mini-trailer – let’s be kind and call it a “trailerette” – the scene of my tryst with the crippled, trainee-janitress Barbie. This trailerette was in the Wagons West Trailer Park right off Route 101 in Oxnard, California. When I say “right off,” I mean I could reach out the window and adjust the rear-view mirrors on passing cars. (It has been said that oxnard is something that comes out of a bull’s nose. I don’t know if that’s true but I can testify that Oxnard, California smells like something that comes out of a bull’s ass.)

Vintage postcard of giant strawberries — **Strawberries bigger than my trailerette.**

Strawberry fields surrounded Oxnard to the horizon. The fruit was grown under long strips of black plastic sheeting so the fields looked as if they had been wrapped in an enormous garbage-bag. But, in a certain light, those garbage bags were beautiful. They shimmered in the sun and radiated heat waves so that, at sunset, Oxnard was a mirage city afloat on a glistening, black-plastic lake.

Wagons West Trailer Park, an island in that lake, was infested with illegal immigrant Mexican families. Wetbacks. Like their Puerto Rican cousins in Brooklyn, they spent their days screaming the Mexican equivalent of “mira, mira,” blasting the Mexican equivalent of Tito Puente music and shoplifting. Wagons West had a swimming pool the size of a toilet bowl so the Mexicans used it as such. All in all, this wasn’t shaping up to be one of the more festive Yuletide seasons of my life. Besides, Christmas and Southern California didn’t go together. It was just plain wrong.

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn — Available as a paperback and eBook
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here
https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

Have Beeper Will Travel

Hospital security guard — This could be me at the start of my graveyard shift
with beeper locked and loaded.

Like most New York actors who think a move West will magically revive their fortunes, I find the trajectory of my L.A. career to be somewhat less than meteoric. In fact, 1981 finds me working as a security guard in Happy Valley Hospital just outside Los Angeles. It sounds like a “funny farm” but it isn’t. You’re thinking of Camarillo State Hospital – the insane asylum that housed Charlie Parker and other jazz-junkies. That’s where Parker wrote his tune Relaxin’ At Camarillo.

Security guard sleeping on the job — This could be me in the *middle* of my graveyard shift
with beeper locked and loaded.

My job at Happy Valley entails walking around in a pretend-cop uniform to reassure people of something or other while carrying a clipboard, jiggling a few doorknobs and reading a few gauges. I have no idea what the fuck I’m reading but I tap the gauges with my pen, nod sagely and pretend to write something on my clipboard. I also have to raise and lower the American flag. This duty is taken seriously by the numb-nut who trains me to be his replacement. He’d been in the National Guard and knows a thing or two about flag raising and flag lowering and especially flag folding – “Now, do it agin and git the triangle-fold tight this time.” He is a Moron First Class.

Betrayal in Brooklyn

Brooklyn Dodgers - Gil Hodges, Johny Podres and Carl Furillo in 1955 — **We loved ’em and they left us**

The history of Brooklyn repeated itself. In 1957, ten years after integrating baseball with Jackie Robinson, the owner of the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn for L.A. It was a devastating blow to the fans and it took Brooklyn decades to recover. The final straw for the owner was watching a Puerto Rican piss into a Coke bottle and throw it at a player on the field. He suddenly understood why the Whites who had fled Brooklyn for the suburbs no longer wanted to sit in the stands at his ballpark. The cover story for the Dodger’s move to L.A. was a dispute with New York about the location of a new stadium. The real reason was White flight.

Proposed domed stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers. — **There was talk of a domed stadium in downtown Brooklyn years before the Houston Astrodome.**

**Brooklyn’s vibrant, “new demographic” pissed all over the idea of a domed stadium.**

Newspaper front page abut Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles — **It took Brooklyn decades to regain its confidence and swagger.**

Orgy in Times Square

The old New York Times building on W. 43rd st. NYC — **Oy, if only I had a nickel for every time I went into the old NY Times building.**

As a fifteen-year-old messenger in Times Square, I get a whiff of the newspaper game by making deliveries to the New York Times. I get to hang out in the newsroom – full of smoking men banging away at typewriters, and in the proofreading room – full of smoking men squinting away at galleys. The paper’s underground printing presses literally shake 43^rd Street when they run at full tilt. The pressmen come up to the street for air wearing admiral-style hats formed out of that day’s front page – a bit of old New York life that is gone forever.

I make regular deliveries to the offices of Broadway producers and to the apartments of gossip columnists where I get a flavor of “the business they call show” and the Public Relations racket. And, I see the ad campaigns unfold in Times Square for the blockbuster movies of that summer. Of course, I’m more interested in the brabusters of that summer. My pace slackens as I inch past the marquees for Orgy at Lil’s Place or Sinderella and the Golden Bra or the many nudist movies like Goldilocks and the Three Bares. I spend three months walking around midtown Manhattan with a perpetual teenage hard-on. No wonder I attract creepy, confusing attention from creepy, confusing men.

David Merrick - Broadway Producer — **David Merrick – he *was* Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s**

**Walter Winchell invented the gossip column and was still hanging on in ’65**

Dorothy Kilgallen - gossip columnist — The “female Winchell” – Dorothy Kilgallen.
She was about to spill the beans about the JFK assassination but committed suicide or was murdered. You decide.

Movie poster for Sinderella and the Golden Bra and Goldilocks and the Three Bares

Movie poster for The Orgy at Lil's Place — SEE the “Art” Class – go on…
you know you want to SEE it.

Mad Men at the Metropole

1960s go-go dancers — **Some guys have all the luck!**

We ad agency messengers fight for the uptown deliveries because they take us past the Metropole Bar. During the day, its doors are kept wide open so passers-by can watch the rock bands play but, more importantly, watch the caged and fringe-skirted go-go girls shake their money-makers. We gawkers must stand behind a yellow line on the sidewalk to let pedestrians pass. Tourist husbands pretend not to look as outraged wives pull them past this go-go Gomorrah. At night, the Metropole closes its doors and the girls go-go topless.

1960s topless go-go girl — **Alas, the doors were closed at night**

My favorite band of the summer is the Eggheads. They wear monk cowls and have their heads shaved like Friar Tuck. And, man, they put on a show that is clean outasite. (That meant “very entertaining” in 1965 parlance.) They and the go-go girls dance the Monkey, Frug, Swim, Jerk, Hitchhike and Watusi in perfectly synchronized moves. It is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I can tell from the way they look at each other that the “with-it” guys in the band are “making it” with the “swingin’ chicks” in the cages and I seriously consider taking up the bass.

Friar Tuck porcelain figureine — **No wonder he’s smiling!**

Daytime in a Nightclub

Crowds outside The Peppermint Lounge — **Suburbanites ready to shake their sacroiliacs**

I spend the clammy days delivering invoices and sample ads to midtown bars, eateries, niteries and the new style of sexy nightclubs called discotheques. Picture this scene straight out of Mike Hammer–

Sunny day. I go into a cave-like club where the chairs are on the tables, the janitor is sweeping up, the bartender is taking stock and a chanteuse is auditioning for the owner. He is seated alone, tie undone, sleeves rolled up, working on a highball and worrying over the receipts.

I live this scene in the world-famousPeppermint Lounge, “the Home of the Twist” – plus the Copacabana, Latin Quarter, Roundtable, Roseland, Arthur, Upstairs at the Downstairs, the Rat Fink Room and, my favorite, the Santa Claus Bar.

Joan Rivers preforming at Upstairs as the Downstairs in New York — **Joan Rivers – the Queen of Clubs**

Vintage ad for Jackie Kannon at The Rat Fink Room, NYC — **I probably delivered this ad**

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase Park I Coney Island, Brooklyn — Available as a paperback and eBook
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

The Fifth Beatle

Vintage postcard of the Paramount Building in Times Square, NYC — **From Frankie to Ringo**

In 1965, I land a messenger job with a penny-ante advertising agency in the Paramount Building in Times Square. It holds the theater where Sinatra had sung to screaming Bobby Soxers in the 1940s. In 1965, the Beatles movie Help! is playing there. To get into the elevator lobby, I have to fight my way through the screaming daughters of those Bobby Soxers.

Screaming Beatles fans in New York City — **Their granddaughters are screaming for Justin Bieber.**

Comedy Can Be A Drag

Drag artist in the Jewel Box Revue — **He had me fooled.**

I was too young to watch the strip-show at The Barracuda Lounge but sometimes I happened to be standing just outside the entrance at show time. From there, I heard the saxophone blare of Night Train and caught glimpses of bleach-blonde bouffant hair and sequined gowns. And, I spied spike hi-heels at the end of long, sinewy legs. Boy, was my face red when I discovered that all of that belonged to the Jewel Box transvestite revue. Guys in Drag! Very popular at The Barracuda. And, my unbigoted Granny mended the G-strings of all the strippers – male and female. Also popular were the Italian boy-singers who beat “Volare” to death. Less popular were the earnest folk-singers hoping that protest songs would make a comeback.

Rodney Dangerfield — **Looks like Rodney was fooled, too.**

Surprisingly some top-name comics used the Barracuda to polish material for The Ed Sullivan Show. One night, I managed to loiter in a back hallway and see an unknown comic named Rodney Dangerfield read his jokes off a stained napkin. He was hilarious. I then saw him mercilessly heckle a then-unknown but now-very-famous comic. They almost duked it out right there. It was a vivid introduction to the vicious world of stand-up.

Johnny Puleo and His Harmonica Gang — **I don’t think he was fooled!**

By far the most popular act to play the Barracuda was a comedy-harmonica ensemble that featured a midget. They had starred on TV and in Vegas but like protest-singers, comedy-harmonica ensembles that featured midgets had become passé. Showbiz is cruel that way.

Bump and Grind

Super-star striptease dancer Tempest Storm — Tempest Storm in her prime.
And, that’s a whole heckuva lotta prime.

“Angel” is another Southern Belle come to Times Square. The strip club MC tells us so when he announces – “Put your hands together and give a big New York welcome to this Sweet Peach from Georgia – Angel.” Enter a very bruised peach with a tubercular cough and emerald green teeth. She might just meet the age requirement for removing her garments in public for the delectation of paying male customers. When she places a small square of rug on the stage and lies down upon it to spread her legs and show us her vaginal cavity, her cough continues unabated. Cough. Anal and vaginal sphincters contract. Relax. Cough. Contract.

So, this is what it’s like to be a gynecologist,think I.

Before you condemn me, hear me out. I haven’t come to this den of debauchery to see Angel or her anal contractions or anyone else and their anal contractions. God as my witness, I am here as a student of theatrical history. To be precise, it is my especial interest in the performance technique of the ecdysiast that has drawn me to see an all-too-rare appearance by the legendary practitioner of that art – Miss Tiffany West. Tiffany is quite rightly the headliner. I am here to see her twirl tasseled pasties in opposite directions on her humongous jugs, do a “bump and grind” to the classic stripper tune Night Train and exit Stage Right. I am neither interested in nor prepared for the opening acts – especially Angel’s opening.

The show comprises the aforementioned “Angel of the Anal Contractions” and a Live Sexxx team – Missy and Major Motion. Missy is a light-skinned, high-buttocked Negress. Major Motion is a sullen, dark-skinned Mandingo who sports a penis the size of my Rocky Colavito model Louisville Slugger. I suspect that Major Motion is his stage name. Missy enters to an anonymous disco vamp. Then the Major enters and then the Major enters Missy. I mean, they proceed to make the “Beast with Two Backs” not five feet from my astonished eyes.

What do they do for an encore?

Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

Marquee of Show World Centre on 42nd street and 8th avenue in New York City — **The Lincoln Center of sleaze**

I’m walking across a sizzling 42^nd street to a morning rehearsal when I see what I’m sure is a “Live Sexxx Team” sauntering to work. I’m also sure they are a married couple so, unlike me, they don’t have to rehearse their act. But, I hope for their sake that their Love Stage is air-conditioned. The distaff side of the Live Sexxx Team is beautiful – Crystal Gayle hair, Crystal Gayle face and Crystal Gayle legs that go all the way up to her Crystal Gayle ass. And, she has thigh-high boots on those Crystal Gayle legs. The boy half of the team isn’t much to look at, but who’s looking? So, he opts for an ensemble of flip-flops, gym-shorts and tank top. I know Crystal can do better than fucking this loser on a Love Stage even if it is air-conditioned. I hanker after Crystal and long to tell her so. I just know, know that we can find happiness as long as she always wears those boots. I am sure she is Southern.

The Best of Crystal Gayle album cover — **Now, imagine thigh-high boots. Can ya blame me?**