Brooklyn – Page 6 – Boy Outa Brooklyn

Obsessive Compulsive Memory Disorder

Vintage ad for memory improvement — **What’s past is prologue**

I have Obsessive Compulsive Memory Disorder. I can’t escape the past. I don’t want to escape the past. I am drawn to it. I want to live in it. I do live in it. An edge of cobblestone peeking through the pavement, an ancient painted sign flaking on the side of a building, a patch of wallpaper revealed by the swing of the wrecker’s ball propels me back to the New York of Boss Tweed, Babe Ruth or the Mad Bomber. I can stare into snowy Green-Wood Cemetery at night meditating on the tombstones and conjure a horse-drawn Currier and Ives sleigh with harness bells jangling. I see the horses’ frozen breath flaring from their nostrils; hear their hooves striking the frozen Brooklyn earth. It is 1845 and I am there.

Currier and Ives painting of a horse drawn sleigh ride. — **That’s me at the reins.**

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

Streetlight Serenade

1950s juvenile delinguents — **Better than the Vienna Boys Choir**

I’m pitching pennies against a wall of the corner grocery store just like I see the big boys do. It’s a form of urban horseshoes. I have no idea what the rules are and have only one penny to pitch but I try my best to look tough and cool. I am six. The big boys are sixteen and hanging out on the corner as they always do on summer nights.

They gather under the streetlight and serenade the block with “Earth Angel” and other doo-wop dirges. This is Brooklyn’s answer to the bel canto street singing of Naples. Figures. Most of these punks are second-generation Napolitano. Rico has a sweet tenor voice so he sings lead. And, despite his polio leg-braces, he plays stickball with the gang. They brag about how far he can hit a ball – “I’m tellin’ ya Rico hit da ball three sewers.”

My friends and I are too young to witness the serious nighttime “rumbles” between the local gangs – The Bishops, The Undertakers, The South Brooklyn Boys and The Testors. (They sniff Testorsbrand airplane glue to get high.) But, the following morning, we scavenge their battle scenes in search of bloody souvenirs – chains, bats, pipes, teeth, spent shells even a loaded zip gun. Its barrel is a car aerial attached to a plank with a sliding bolt and rubber bands as primitive trigger-mechanism. We fire it in a basement where it explodes nearly blinding us all. We decide to leave the heavy artillery to the big boys.

Boys pointing toy guns at camera — **Juvenile Delinquents in training.**

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memory 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

The Brooklyn Boys vs. The Boy Scouts

Norman Rockwell painting of a nice Boy Scout — **Not in my troop**

We are a blue-collar Scout troop without a full uniform between us – more Bowery Boys than Baden Powell. We don’t buy our gear at the official Boy Scout store which is strictly for fagateers but at the Army surplus stores on Canal Street. Who cares if our canteens leak and our hatchets shatter? They are what General Patton’s soldiers used and that’s all that matters.

Only once is our tough-guy veneer pierced. It is when we encounter a disfigured boy who pitches his tent right next to ours at a Boy Scout Jamboree. The merit badge sash he wears across his torso contains more badges than our troop has won in its entire history. He is also an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of The Arrow. This is like being a Green Beret and a Navy Seal. He is tall and well built. But, atop his perfectly formed body sits the most deformed head and face I have ever seen. His skull is squashed, elongated and lopsided. His features are randomly stuck onto the front of it like the plastic ears, mouth and nose of a Mr. Potato Head – a Mr. Potato Head who has been dropped from a great height. He has one misshapen ear on top of his skull and another down near his chin so that his glasses hang on his face in a vertical rather than horizontal line. His eyes, nose, and mouth are not much more than holes. Imagine the face of Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame drawn by Picasso then put through a wood chipper.

The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters — **We weren’t as tough as we pretended to be.**

Attack of the Blessed Virgin Mary

“Catholics also believe that the Blessed Virgin appears to mere mortals in various times, places and languages. The most famous Marian apparitions, not counting her many miraculous appearances on moldy pizza, dried toast and wet cardboard, are –

Our Lady of Lourdes (France)
Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mexico)
Our Lady of Fatima (Portugal)
Our Lady of Bayside (Queens)

“Like the Little Green Men who pilot flying saucers, Mary appears only to illiterate, poverty-stricken, scrofula-ridden peasants who sleep with their livestock. Hence, her appearance in Queens. There is a theory that the BVM is, in fact, the occupant of a UFO misinterpreted by Catholic shepherds in the only way that makes sense to them – ‘Hey, Esteban, look, up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s the Virgin Mary.’

Movie poster of Invasion of the Saucer Men

BVM or BEM – coincidence? You decide.

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio — Available as a paperback and eBook
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here
https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

The Curse of Christine Keeler

Poster for Hammer horror film - The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) — Classic *monstah pitchah*

The Curse of Frankenstein jump started my interest in all things English, especially English knockers. Puerto Rican girls were sexy but I expected them to be since they wore hot socks and had hair on their cha-chas from birth. English girls were sexy coz they weren’t supposed to be but especially coz they talked good. The fact that a woman could speak like the Queen and fuck like a spic drove me and my friends crazy.

Our obsession reached fever pitch with the Christine Keeler scandal in 1963. We were still sitting on the stoop but were now sitting atop fully descended testicles. We loitered there at night waiting for the next day’s tabloids to be delivered to Rocco’s Candy Store. We smelled the headlines coming over the Brooklyn Bridge then raced each other down the block to get our hands on the photos of Christine and her sidekick Mandy Rice-Davies. These two young women – English women, actually DID IT and didn’t think it was matter for Confession. We punched each other black and blue in debates about which of the pair was sexier. Most of us chose Mandy coz she was a blonde. No lie – no movie or documentary ever came close to capturing the level of interest the Profumo affair held for the pubescent boys of Brooklyn.

Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler — *Doity* English girls who DID IT

The Curse of Hammer Horror Honeydews

Yutte Stensgaard in Lust for a Vampire (1971) — **Hammer Horror Honeydews**

In 1957, the year I made my First Communion, the Devil popped up on my shoulder at the movies as I watched the English “monstha pitchah” The Curse of Frankenstein. He jabbed me and whispered, “Pssstt. Hey, kid, check out da bazooms on dat babe sittin’ next ta ya!” I turned my head and saw a teenage honey “making out” with her pimply boyfriend. He was rounding Second Base and heading for Third. She was squirming around inside a tight, low-cut blouse. She had long black hair all the way down her back. None on top of her head. Just all the way down her back. (Sorry – Brooklyn joke. I couldn’t resist.) Her lush black ringlets cascaded to her shoulders. She had gold hoop earrings and insolent, red lips. She might easily have been Puerto Rican. And, damn, I’d left the mozzarella at home! This torrid teen may have been spoken for but thanks to her heaving-honeydews and the heaving-Hammer-honeydews on the screen, I was one randy seven-year-old packing a pocket-rocket.

Possibly Lysette Anthony in Hammer horror film — **Another near occasion of *sinematic* sin.**

Can I get a witness?

Street preacher with "end of the world" sign. — **A Jehovah’s Witness sitting down on the job.**

It is my happy fate to live in Brooklyn and London neighborhoods where Jehovah’s Witnesses train their doorbell-ringing missionaries. They are almost always Black. Imagine the delight of a pair of young, Witness trainees when, far from slamming the door in their faces, the nice White man invites them in for a chat. A long chat. A very long chat. Imagine their chagrin to discover that the nice White man knows more about their religion than they do. Imagine the trainees running and screaming from the suddenly crazed White man when he dons a pair of red, light-up, devil horns and asks them to abandon Jehovah and become Sam Butera’s Witnesses.

Jack Chick comic book. — **A Christian message of love and forgiveness.**

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio
Image: The smiling face of Steeplechase 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

Comic-book Cosmic Consciousness

Vintage comic-book ad for The Rosicrucians. — **Sirhan Sirhan’s mystery school of choice.**

The Rosicrucians are those mail-order mystics who promise to teach you the “Wisdom of the Ancients” in weekly installments. (Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin, was a Rosicrucian and look what all that ancient wisdom did for him!) I first meet The Rosicrucians in comic books. Their ads about seeing into the future are next to ads for x-ray glasses for seeing through women’s clothes. The Rosicrucians claim to go all the way back to Ancient Egypt but actually only go all the way back to San Jose.

Vintage comic-book ad for X-Ray Specs. — **Every Brooklyn boy’s dream!**

Stoop of Horror

Vintage horror comic book cover as read on the stoops of Brooklyn. — **Classic stoop reading material**

A few years after my exposure to photographs of kinky sex, I become addicted to visual depictions of violence. Every Thursday night I get my twenty-five cents allowance and hot-foot it to Rocco’s Candy Store to buy the latest comic books. I have no interest in sissy stuff like Archie or Richie Rich. I crave Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. Actually, what I really crave are the skin mags on the top shelves. I crane my neck to see them until Rocco suggests that I leave his establishment, “Get da fuck outa here kid before I tell ya muddah.” I then hunker down on a stoop under a streetlight and read. So strong is my desire to escape the din and dysfunction in my home that I sit on the stoop even on winter nights.

Ah, alone in my study at last. All I need are my pipe and slippers.

Attack of the Killer Dwarf

Souvenir postcard from Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn. — Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn
Better than Disneyland

I am seven and in Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park – a magical relic of a Victorian amusement park. I’m lost in a dark hallway and I’m ascared. I must have taken a wrong turn getting off the Shoot-the-Chute.

Shoot-the-chute at Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn

I open a door and I’m in the employees’ locker room. Right before me sits a dwarf-clown in whiteface but only halfway into his Pagliacci costume. Baggy clown-pants below. Guinea T-shirt on top. He is smoking and reading The Daily News. He sports a popular tattoo – a black panther climbing up his forearm and drawing drops of red blood with its claws. The dwarf-clown gives me a genuinely malevolent look – not one of those stagey, evil dwarf-clown looks so popular in modern horror-movies. This dwarf-clown hates being a dwarf. Hates being a clown. Hates being the same size as this seven-year-old punk standing before him. Hates me. “Get the fuck outahere,” he rasps.

I get the fuck outathere.