Brooklyn – Page 5 – Boy Outa Brooklyn

Some Entertained Angels Unawares

Vintage Archie comic book cover — **Uncle Sam even got Jughead’s ass!**

Place: Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn

Time: Early morning. November. 1969

Weather: Fareezzing fucking cold.

I am standing in a long line of young men, all in our underwear, all shivering and all ascared to be in a long hallway waiting for our physicals, waiting for our fates.

So, this is the Army, I muse.
Shivering before I die, I muse.
Nixon can shove it up Kissinger’s ass, I muse.

Then, I hear a voice. Faint. It comes from mid-air just above and to the left of my head. The voice says, “Walk out.” The voice repeats, “Walk out.” Like a good soldier, I obey orders. I get dressed. I walk out. No one says, “Hey, you.” No sentry shouts, “Stop or I’ll shoot.” I go home. I wait for another letter pushed under my door. I wait for the knock of the MPs. Nothing. Then, a week later, the Lottery brings deliverance in the form of a life-saving high number. And, just like that, it’s over. Over. I have slipped through the cracks. I have avoided Vietnam – avoided the Draft, dismemberment, death. I feel joy, of course, but it’s tempered by survivor’s guilt – I know young men who have lost the Lottery. Most of all I give thanks to that Voice. How? What? Why? Who was that Voice? Was it the voice of my Guardian Angel? I didn’t believe I had a Guardian Angel but I’d been hedging my Catholic bets and sorta-kinda hoping he was there.

Guardian Angel walking with little boy — **“Walk out.”**

________________________

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

Simon and Garfinkel

Harold Gary in the musical Oklahoma — **Harold Garfinkel, er…. I mean Gary**

Then there was Harold Gary – real name Harold Garfinkel. Art Garfunkel was his nephew so it should have been Simon and Garfinkel. Harold was an excellent character-actor who first appeared on Broadway in the 1920s. (Remember the wealthy heroin dealer in The French Connection who looked like a Jewish orangutan? That was Harold.) We shared a dressing room and since we were both sports-fans, we became fast friends. And, since I was a theater buff, I was a perfect audience for his showbiz war stories. Harold claimed to have fucked every woman in show business and to have told every man in show business to go fuck himself.

I’d be doing my pre-show warm-ups while Harold reclined pasha-like on the union- mandated cot and cast his pearls-of-wisdom my way –

“Stop with the stretching already. The best warm-up for a show is a good bowel movement just before curtain.
“So, I gave Jayne Mansfield a dozen chicks for Easter, all different colors – red, blue, purple – but she rolled over on top of them while she was sleeping and killed ’em all. She was too upset to fuck so I took her bowling instead.
“Mae West’s sister used to give blowjobs in the basement of the Brill Building.
“So, I’m sitting in the steam room with little Larry Hart. Ya know – Rodgers & Hart? He was almost a midget. Who comes in but Joe Louis and I’m tellin’ ya his prick reaches down to his knees. And, Larry Hart sez to him – ‘Joe, that thing’s bigger than I am. Aren’t you afraid it’ll turn on ya?’
“Joe Louis told me that Sonja Henie was the best pussy he ever had next to Fanny Brice.
“So, I walks up to Mike Todd an’ I sez to him – Mike, that’s the kind of guy I am and if you don’t like it step outside.
“1929, I was in the original Diamond Lil with Clark Gable. No one knew who he was. I take him down to Coney Island one day – we swim, we box, we play handball, we ride bikes, we play basketball, we play tennis. On the way home on the subway he sez to me, ‘Harold,’ he sez, ‘I feel like I’ve spent a month in the country.’ I sez to him – Clark, I do this ev’y day.
“’Nother time, I’m down Coney and I’m swimmin’ way out. I was very ath-a-letic, see. A guy swims up and sez, ‘You mind if I swim along with ya?’ I sez, Fine. When we get back to the beach he sticks out his mitt and sez, ‘I’m Roy Cohn.’ I sez – Why didn’t you tell me out there, I woulda drowned ya, ya bastard.
“Ya know my brother Sid Gary was the tenor on the Bing Crosby radio show.
“You ever hear of Harry Greb the boxer with one glass eye. Forget about these faggot boxers today. Harry Greb…
“I ever tell you about the time I fucked Helen Twelvetrees?”

**The beautiful Helen Twelvetrees. Hmmmnnn… maybe in Harold’s dreams**

Supermarket Shakespeare

Classics Illustrated cover for Hamlet — **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 8^th 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

Classics Illustrated cover for Macbeth — **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.

Zorro Was Here

The template for scatological terror

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?

Charles Laughton as Quasimodo — **Quasimodo wore his hearing aid in his *right* ear.**

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.**

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.

The Phantom of 42nd Street

Plaster casts of mutilated faces — **Plaster casts taken from soldiers’ mutilated faces**

It is 3 AM on a rainy night and I’m walking down the deserted, darker stretch of 42^nd between 6^th and 7^th avenues. The wet pavement reflects the neon lights from the two porn stores still open. As I approach one of these, I see a man exiting while clutching to his chest a paper bag filled with photos of female flesh. I immediately detect something odd about his gate. It isn’t the usual overly-casual yet dartingly-furtive walk of men as they enter and exit dirty bookstores and movies. No. This man’s body seems permanently shaped into a posture of “shying away” as if he is flinching before a punch is thrown.

As I get closer to him, I see that he is wearing a plastic medical mask in a pitifully unsuccessful attempt to conceal that he has no face. The mask is the color of Pepto Bismol to suggest flesh tone with features crudely painted on. The lips are much too large and much too red. The eyebrows are even worse. I follow him at a distance and note the practiced, heartbreaking way he avoids the gaze of passing strangers and finds shadows and darkened doorways by which to pick his way down the street and home.

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.

Brooklyn Boys and Cowboys

Pistol Pete the Oklahoma State University mascot — That moustache sure looks
Italian to me!

This Brooklyn Boy has always had a strong affinity for Oklahoma – the Broadway musical, the college football team and the Okie cowboy in the movie Mighty Joe Young. As a wee tot, I would rise at dawn to watch the Oklahoma televangelist Oral Roberts sweat, shout and heal hillbilly hernias – “In the name of Jesus, HEAL!” My soft spot for all things Okie may have a genetic component. My great Uncle Ugo had fallen in love with the promise of Oklahoma and moved there in the 1920s. How’s this for a coincidence – I discovered that Ben Johnson who played the Okie cowboy in Mighty Joe Young was from the town where Uncle Ugo settled – Pawhuska. In family photos, there is tiny Ugo, right out of Dago Central Casting, standing on Main Street amongst the Oklahoma cowboys and Osage Indians. And, he is smiling. He is home.

Vintage postcard of Osage Indian chief, Pawhuska, Oklahoma — **One of Uncle Ugo’s friends?**

I’d been ridiculed for my Brooklyn accent at a summer camp in nearby New Jersey. What must those cowboys and Indians have made of a greaseball barber & fiddle-maker from far-off Brooklyn? But, maybe his fiddle making bought Ugo acceptance and, I hope, friendship. Yup, Uncle Ugo made violins for country musicians. Then he caught some disease that my mother was sure was syphilis but wasn’t. My man-hating mother was convinced that any and every male illness was due to illicit and even licit sexual intercourse and the only solution was prolonged, painful punishment for said intercourse. She actually liked Ugo but even he could not escape her censure. Poor Ugo returned to Brooklyn to die. I like to think that his fiddles are still being played and that I’ve heard them. Maybe one of his instruments was used by my favorite Western Swing band – Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. It’s possible because despite their name they were based in Oklahoma.

Album cover of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys — **The Beatles of Western Swing**

The Wild One

Tony Unbatz, the top punk on my block, is known to be, as his Italian nickname implies, crazy – “batz.” He’ll do anything on a dare and more without one. He’s a skinny kid with a nose bigger than he is. He weighs at most a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet and since he’s drenched in beer that’s what he weighs tonight. Tony dresses like Marlon Brando in The Wild One – motorcycle jacket, boots and garrison belt. And, like all the Juvenile Delinquents in 1950s America, he apes Brando’s schtick – “Don’t bug me coz I’m a sullen, sensitive, tough-but-tender, misunderstood punk-poet.” The juvenile delinquents of Brooklyn even try to mimic Brando’s Southern accent from The Wild One. When Beatlemania hits Brooklyn, the punk-poets of that era attempt a Liverpool accent, “Toydy toyd and toyd meets the Moysey.” Brooklyn rock bands have to pretend to be English to get gigs and so they name themselves – The Churchills, The Cuppa Tease and The Chamber Pots.

AD for a Beatles wig circa 1964 — **Just like the real thing…sort of**