boyoutabrooklyn

Mr Clean

Pimp in his pimp finery. — **Nobel laureate in training**

When not exchanging pleasantries with prostitutes, I cleaned the apartments of their pimps, namely one Demetrius Jones. It may not surprise you to learn that Mr. Jones was a Negro gentleman whose teef… er, I mean teeth were jewel-encrusted. Every surface in his pad was glass or chrome – the better to facilitate coke sniffing by Mr. Jones and his bitches. (He frequently had female houseguests.) Many’s the time I would look up from mopping his kitchen floor to see a naked wench drinking orange juice straight from the carton. (I ask you!) She would then paddle to the toilet and use it without closing the door. (Some people!) She would then paddle back to the bed of Demetrius Jones yawning and sniffing all the way. (I just mopped there!) Did I imagine it or was she cruelly humming the tune to Cinderella? (Bitch!)

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

Hookers in Heat

New York street prostitutes — **Little Sisters of the Poor collecting for charity**

The New York summer of 1973, the summer of Carrie’s murder, simmered like every other New York summer – over-heated cabs, over-heated buses, over-heated subways, over-heated apartments, over-heated offices, over-heated people. Olga, the least talented of the untalented avant-garde actresses in our building, got very over-heated about a White hooker and her Black pimp who lived across the street. They looked like a super-hero team that had fallen on threadbare times. He squeezed his fat ass into gold-lamé hand-me-downs from Superfly while she favored silver-latex unitards. Unfortunately, the unitards did not favor her full-figured frame. This girl had been around the block several times. And, I don’t mean St. Mark’s Place. (I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick!) But, why/how this dumpy duo got on Olga’s untalented tits escaped me.

The Roach Motel

American, Oriental, German and Brown-banded ockroaches — **My roommates**

“Safety” is an over-heated, fifth-floor walk-up with hot-and-cold running cockroaches. They are everywhere. When I turn on the lights, the entire room moves. I often can’t face the scurrying brown multitude and leave the room in darkness. Then in a demonstration of the Darwinian principle of adaptation, the brown multitude mutates to albino making it easier for the roaches to conceal themselves on the white porcelain of our sink and tub. Their white camouflage is most effective in the bristles of our toothbrushes. The only give away is the barely detectable movement of the tiny, black, roach eyes. I want to believe that I always spot these albino interlopers before sticking my toothbrush into my mouth. I desperately want to believe that.

Psychedelic Slum

Hippies on St. Mark's Place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan — **“Hippie-central” aka St. Mark’s Place**

In the late 1960s, the Lower East Side and especially St. Mark’s Place is the epicenter of New York’s hippie-yippie-trippieworld. It is Haight-Ashbury East. It is lined with head shops, record-shops, bookshops, poster-shops and vintage-clothes shops. The sidewalk is packed with freaks, frauds and fools. It’s fun. But, by the early 1970s, when Rob and I move in, St. Mark’s is lined with strung-out hippie-junkies and emaciated speed-freaks – the kids who forgot to get off the train before it hit the wall. They are gawked-at by tardy tourists in from Omaha and Osaka. (“Is this where the hippies live?”) In 1968, I see a Black hippie digging for food in a macrobiotic restaurant’s garbage can. Fifty years later, I see him doing the very same and he looks remarkably healthy. I’m astounded that the macrobiotic manure hasn’t killed him.

Strung out hippie shooting heroin. — **“Damn, that vein was here a second ago.”**

In the early ’70s, now that their patchouli-oil bubble has burst in an explosion of exceptionally sour disappointment, the hippie-junkies and emaciated speed-freaks feel it is their right to “liberate” money from others – “This is a stick-up… er, I mean, this is a revolution, man.” Young actors are easy prey. So, when returning home late at night, Rob and I avoid the sidewalk and practice our broken-field running down the middle of the street. We figure this gives us more chance of evading any muggers or bullets headed our way.

Make it nice!

The Carnegie Delicatessen in New York City — **New York Jewish Deli Heaven**

When I am flush with cash, i.e. I have two bucks-a-day to splurge on food, I eat in a hole-in-the-wall Jewish deli on Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. I am moving up in the culinary world as I move west across the Isle of Manhattan. Here I catch abuse from the ferocious Jewish waiters. They treat everyone with utter disdain but their barley soup and challah French toast are worth it. When they have decided you are a regular, they make one tiny concession toward recognizing your existence by growling your breakfast order thusly – “Gimme an omelet, make it nice!”

Jewish deli omelette — **They made it NICE**

The first time I hear my omelet ordered this way, I feel that I have won the Congressional Medal of Honor. The Key to The City. The Oscar. I stop strangers in the street and kvell, “Hey, I ordered an omelet and the waiter said, make it nice!” The strangers offer hearty congratulations but are envious, even dismayed – “Damn, they never said make it nice about my omelet.”

Menu for a Starving Actor

The Mayor of New York City - John Lindsay — **The Republican JFK**

AIDS does not get my friend, Carrie. No, this young actress is murdered in 1973 while AIDS is waiting in the wings. She is slain in the city of Taxi Driver,The Panic in Needle Park, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and The French Connection. Handsome John Lindsay is Mayor. He is called the Republican Kennedy. In 1966, he wins office with the slogan, “Everyone else looks tired but he looks fresh.” But, by 1973, Handsome John has wilted along with the confidence of the ’60s. His color has faded along with the Peter Max posters in the Upper East Side and the Hippie murals in the Lower East Side. Rob and I share an apartment there on St. Mark’s Place. Two actors. One struggling. One not. Rob is not only “not” but “hot.” I have to endure the sheer joy of taking phone messages for him – “Rob, Sam Shepard asked if you’d read his play and Sidney Lumet phoned again. Oh, Mike Nichols wants to take you to lunch.”

Vintage Florida post card — Brought to you by the Sunshine State
Chamber of Commerce

While Rob is lunching at Lutèce, I’m living on a buck-a-day meal money. Desperate for food, my antennae pick up a radio commercial that promises free dinner at Luchow’s German restaurant in return for listening to a sales pitch. The pitch will be for a property scam in Florida – Rancho Refritos Estates. Selling land in Florida is the oldest racket in America, second only to alternative medicine. (David Mamet’s brilliant play Glenngarry Glenn Ross is about Florida land-swindles.)

Movie poster for Glenngary Glen Ross by David Mamet — **They’d try to sell ice to an Eskimo. And, do it.**

Don’t try this at home!

Gay men in a 1970s pre-AIDS leather bar — **A bunch of the boys were whooping it up…**

One night, Ray and Preacher take me to a notorious gay bar way west in Greenwich Village –The Toilet. (I ain’t makin’ this up – The Toilet!) The dress-style ranges from crotchless black-leather pants to crotchless black-leather pants with metal studs. And, the metal studs are on the penis, not the pants. While who knows what is going on in the back room, we are entertained out front by the floorshow. This consists of an acrobat pulling his upside-down body up a thick iron chain, link by link, with his anal sphincter muscles. Yes, this intrepid aerialist climbs up the chain with his asshole!

When AIDS comes to town

Patient with Kaposi's sarcoma of the head and neck. — **It was first called the “gay cancer”**

Time passed, medicine advanced and we forgot. We forgot what a scourge AIDS was, especially in show business, especially in New York. By the late 1980s, I was the only actor still alive from several casts I’d been in during the 1970s.

At the height of the AIDS panic, I dated a public health official. She told me plans were in place to quarantine the entire city of New York, if necessary. The authorities foresaw streets piled with corpses collected by robot-controlled plague-carts. “Bring out your dead.” They were that ascared.

Print of a Black Plague cart — **Vision of a dystopian Greenwich Village**

I first heard of AIDS in 1979 – the dawn of the epidemic. I had moved to a Brooklyn brownstone. Ray, my gay landlord said, “Have you heard that all the guys in the Village are getting sick? They’re calling it the gay cancer.” I still see Ray sitting there, still see the terror in his eyes, still feel the terror that shot through me. We both knew that what he was describing will kill him and maybe me. We were both ascared.

Columbus Confidential

The world's first Wendy's restaurant. (Columbus, Ohio) — **Sorry, New York, Paris and London but Columbus got it first!**

Columbus. The capital city of Ohio. Home to me while I perform at the spanking new theater in town. And, home to the world’s first Wendy’s restaurant. For the record, I am second-to-none in my admiration for and appreciation of Wendy’s hamburgers. But, I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing when my “Host Family” drives me to the original Wendy’s as if they are Romans taking me to The Pantheon. They enthuse at me, using an “I know you’re not gonna believe this but” tone of voice that this very building, the very first Wendy’s, was opened in 1969!

Throughout my time in Columbus,three ancient Black women shadow me. Wherever I go, they are there.

Are they unemployed Witches seeking a production of Macbeth?

The three witches in Macbeth — **The Weird Sisters of Columbus, Ohio**

The three are identical in size, shape and age. And, they dress identically – cloth coats, hats with veils, orthopedic shoes and black handbags. They seem teleported from an undefined time “back there” somewhere – not quite the 1920s or ’30s but rather from “no time” and “all time.” But, definitely a more righteous time. I assume they are Jehovah’s Witnesses making the rounds. But, no. They carry no religious tracts of any kind or creed. I somehow understand that I may not speak to them. And, they never speak to me but only stare in mute judgment. Compassionate but disapproving.

I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts.

The drag-artist, Charles Pierce as Mae West — **The comic-genius, Charles Pierce as Mae West**

DIVERTIMENTO ON DRAG

Allow me to expound on the subject of men performing in women’s clothing, aka Drag. More specifically, I wish to discuss the surprising and surprisingly potent erotic effect that Drag exerts on the female of the species. I am aware that some women dispute this fact but I can do no more than honestly recount my experiences as a female impersonator. So there.

In South Pacific, I played a World War Two sailor who entertains the troops by wearing a hula skirt, a bra fashioned out of two coconut halves and a mop for a wig. Not a sexy outfit. Or, so I thought until I got it on. It drove the women crazy. The chorus girls slinked up to me and whispered words in my ear that would have made a real sailor blush. The spinsterish theater secretaries were the worst. They cornered me and fondled my coconuts while hissing about what they were going to do to my tits and then to me. But, as soon as my coconuts came off, the erotic spell was broken. No coconuts = No dice.

Two coconuts — **Naked breasts… er, I mean, coconuts. Oh, hell, even I’m confused!**