So, I got an email from amazon claiming that some of my recent reviews had not followed its “community guidelines” and had caused offence i.e. some of my reviews had cost Jeff Bezos a few shekels. Trust me, I write honest reviews good and bad. I like nothing better than praising a well written book or recommending a product that’s worth its price. Sadly, I don’t get to write either of those very often. But when a book or widget is good, I am fulsome in my praise.
If it’s crap, I dip my quill in venom and say so in strong but never vulgar language. In fact, my bad reviews are very funny. Sarcasm is the best revenge.
I got to thinkin’ about amazon’s “community guidelines” and what constitutes “offensive” material in the eyes of Jeff Bezos. So, I played a game. I entered every sexual kink and perversion I could think of (including ILLEGAL ones) into the amazon search engine and whatayaknow…
Jeff Bezos is happily selling everything from Analingus to Zoophilia.
For those of you in the back of the classroom that means everything from sex with shit to sex with Shih Tzus. Okay, that’s a cute little bow but, “Come on, Jeff.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no prude as my long-suffering readers can attest. My memoir Boy Outa Brooklyn is plenty dirty but it’s honest, clean dirt not juvenile jerk-off junk. Further, I believe that what consenting, adult Shih Tzus do in the privacy of their kennel is their business. But I wanna know how come books celebrating sex with the family or the family dog do not offend and are not against amazon’s “community guidelines ” while books questioning any part of the official “holocaust narrative” of WW2 or any aspect of the Covid-hoax are immediately censored?
Hmmmnnnn…
Call me old fashioned but amazon shouldn’t be encouraging sex with excrement or corpses. That’ll make ya waaayyy sicker than Covid 19.
Don’t believe me? Play my game yourself.
Invent your own feeltheee search terms – the sicker the better. Guaranteed to supply hours o’ fun for the whole family.
Meanwhile, here are my favorite degenerate-discoveries for sale on amazon with the much vaunted “Jeff Bezos Seal of Approval” –
This next title is too good to miss –
Housewife Lesbian Babysitter
Remember that you can’t sell or buy books on amazon that in any way question the official “holocaust narrative” of WW2. But that doesn’t mean Jeff won’t sell you some holocaust porn… er, I meant to say holocaust erotica – a genre very popular in… Israel.
This fräulein gives Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS a run for the money. Believe it or not, The Toymaker and the Nazi Sadomasochist was not short-listed for a Pulitzer.
If we’re supposed to be worried about Covid infection when someone gets within three feet of us or doesn’t wear a mask then we better be worried big-time about getting within a mile of anyone who dreams of or dabbles in the depravities depicted above. You better pray they’re using hand sanitizer!
The National Socialists are condemned for being book burners. But they didn’t burn classics. They burned unnatural and unhealthy trash like the books for sale on ever-so progressive and enlightened amazon.
You asked for it, you got it! Here’s my latest hard-boiled homage to the tough-guy reporters of yesteryear – Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon.
Supreme Court cutie Ruth Bader Ginsberg crowed many times that her Jewishness shaped her judicial outlook . . . Not the Bill of Rights, the Torah . . . Not the Federalist Papers, the Talmud . . . Not the Constitution, the Kaballah . . . So I guess it was her Jewishness that made Ruthie promote lowering the age of sexual consent to twelve . . . TWELVE . . . TWELVE!!!! . . .
R.I.P. RBG
The last known living photo of Judge Ginsberg.
Here’s a definition of chutzpah: Ginsberg, the champion of affirmative action, hired only one Black law clerk during her forty year judicial career. FORTY YEARS. ONE BLACK . . . She claimed she couldn’t find any more who were qualified . . . I call that “affirmative action for thee but not for me” . . . The Noxious RBG spent her last four years on the bench in a coma with her law clerks propping her up like the eponymous hero of the movie Weekend at Bernie’s . . .
That’s our gal Ruthie in the middle.
Had Ruthie not been so high-on-her-own-supply and convinced she was the “indispensable” woman, she would/could have retired when Obama was President thus assuring that someone equally toxic would have taken her place . . . Funny how karma bites even the most high and mighty on their high and mighty asses, ain’t it . . . But, waaaaiiittt a minute here, Ruth Bader Ginsberg said that the Black football players in the NFL (Negro Felon League) were “stupid and disrespectful” for kneeling during the national anthem. That’s not nice . . .
Yo, Colin, my man, the ‘fro, can we talk?
Saint Ruthie wasn’t the only extreme libtard with “surprising” views on race and sex . . . Che Guevera (the Left’s favorite pin-up) said, “Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians” and “The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meagre wage on frivolity or drink.” . . .
Che (the most reproduced face in history aside from Christ) was no friend of the LGBTQ crowd. In fact, he called homosexuals “scum” and put them in concentration camps where they labored beneath a sign that wittily proclaimed, “Work will make you men.” . . . Some say that sort of anti-gay vitriol only comes from a closet queen. Hmmmnnnn . . .
Che doing his famous impersonation of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Speaking of the “lavender lads” – it’s being whispered in the corridors of power that Chief Justice John Roberts is “light in the loafers” and is being blackmailed by a certain tribe of rootless-cosmopolitans? . . . This explains his lurch to the Left . . .
Roberts and his long-suffering beard, er… I mean, wife.
Not possible? Welp, the Mafia blackmailed and deballed the famous “crime buster” of the 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver with pix of his pussy-hound ways . . .
The Senator’s coonskin cap drove the gals plum crazy. Or, maybe they thought they were fucking Fess Parker.
Yup, Ol’ Estes made JFK look like a choirboy . . . As long as we’re talkin’ about choirboys . . .
Joel Osteen runs a mega-church in Dallas. He is the most popular televangelist in America.
This squeaky-clean holy-huckster isn’t preaching the Gospel. He’s just sprinkling a bit of Jesus over Napoleon Hill’s classic self-help book Think and Grow Rich. . . Hey, how come we let immigrants with tuberculosis, polio and even plague flood into our countries but if your dog isn’t vaccinated you’re in big trouble? . . . John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival had never been to Louisiana or even seen the Mississippi River before he wrote Proud Mary and other songs about the Bayou . . . In pre-WW2 Hollywood, actors were blacklisted for not being commies . . . Ronald Reagan’s film career tanked when “liberal” Hollywood blacklisted him for daring to clean the commies out of the Screen Actors Guild while he was union president . . . Morons who mock Reagan’s acting have never seen King’s Row, Juke Girl or Storm Warning . . .
This scribe is no fan of chimp comedies but Ronnie was better with a chimp co-star in Bedtime for Bonzo than Cary Grant was in Monkey Business.
As long as were discussing simians in the cinema – George Floyd fucked-on-film in porn movies . . . This just in – evidence has emerged (seen by your reporter) that Georgie Boy Floyd was a longtime police informant (snitch) – that’s considered the lowest form of life in the ‘hood. . . Meanwhile, Floyd’s fellow-felon Jacob Blake whose shooting caused all the kerfuffle in Kenosha, Wisconsin had a habit of raping women including his baby-mama. He raped her while her young daughter was in the bed next to her. The insistent dusky Casanova forced his fingers into his beloved’s vagina, smelled them and opined, “It smells like you bins wit udder mens.” . . . His baby-mama tearfully testified to this and, ya know, we gotta believe the woman . . . She called the cops to arrest Blake. He attacked the cops, was shot while reaching for a weapon and was left paralyzed from the waist down . . . Mayhaps the unfortunate Blake’s sexual activity will be restricted to digital insertion (hopefully consensual) for the foreseeable . . .
Jazz singer Lorez Alexandria was as good as any of ‘em and better than most.
But unlucky Lorez never had that all-important hit record so she never got the bookings and acclaim she deserved . . . One dame who got nothing but undeserved acclaim was Margaret Mead the most famous woman in Cultural Anthropology . . .
Here’s Maggie getting fashion tips from the locals. ‘Scuse me but isn’t that what’s called “cultural appropriation?”
Maggie was hoaxed by the South Sea island teens when she wrote her famous pro-Brown, anti-White study Coming of Age in Samoa . . . Turns out their society was actually very straight-laced and violent – not at all the peaceful, sexual paradise the dim-witted Mead portrayed . . .
Cultural Bullshit
Mead was a student of the Jewish-Marxist Franz Boas. He invented the pseudo-science of Cultural-Anthropology which holds that a Bantu banging on a tree trunk in the jungle is of equal artistic value to the work of Bach . . .
Franz Boas demonstrating how he squats to pee.
Guess what? Franny’s famous skull measurement studies which supposedly proved racial equality have been exposed as totally bogus . . . Boas cooked the books to push his anti-White Marxist crap . . . He was as crooked as that other fraud Sigmund Freud . . . Meanwhile, I’m scratchin’ my noggin’ over why people who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves . . . Heard on the Rialto and Rodeo Drive: Meghan Markle is the most pretentious, presumptuous twat in public life and has already worn out her welcome stateside . . .
The Woman Who Would Be Queen aka The Mulatto Greta Thunberg
Tell ya the truth, I’d sooner listen to political punditry from Scary Spice . . . Fred Astaire failed an early Hollywood screen test with this critique, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” . . .
Here’s another showbiz “ouch” – Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford turned down Arthur Miller’s great play Death of a Salesman with this note, “Who wants to see a play about a traveling salesman?” . . . So explain to me why the same loons who say there is no such thing as gender are screeching that there must be a female President . . . Here’s some good news – the future belongs to the fertile. The gender-liquid brigade, the cis-phobic snowflakes and other assorted psycho-sexual misfits aren’t reproducing . . . Wanna know who is breeding? Mormons, Amish, Hasids, Muslims and Evangelical Christians. Looks like the future belongs to the fundamentalists, too . . .
The Roman poet Horace predicted this state of affairs with – “You can chase Mother Nature out with a pitchfork but she will always return.”
Epictetus, another Roman smarty-pants, cautioned people in the first century not to talk about themselves at dinner parties. The first century!!!
Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle each wrote multi-volume histories of WW2 . . . These three wartime titans devoted about a paragraph each to European Jewry with no mention of gas chambers . . . Betcha didn’t know this – the British almost dropped the atomic bombs on Japan using their Lancaster bombers coz America’s B-29s were too small . . . Elvis Presley “The King” died on the “throne” whilst straining at stool . . . But even in the worst of Presley’s stupid movies there is at least one good tune . . . Barbara Streisand wanted Elvis to co-star with her in A Star Is Born but after one meeting with Babs, The King took a pasadena . . . Who sez Elvis was a dumb hillbilly? . . .
Elvis doing his famous impersonation of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Laurence Olivier almost played the Marlon Brando role in The Godfather . . . Robert Redford almost played the Dustin Hoffman role in The Graduate . . . Jackie Gleason almost played the Gene Hackman role in The French Connection. . . If you think Jackie would have been a weird choice then you obviously haven’t seen him in Requiem for a Heavyweight and The Hustler . . . “The Great One” was a great actor . . . Mary Baker Eddy, the deranged founder of Christian Science, insisted her flock eschew doctors and medicine coz the body and pain didn’t exist; only spirit was real and flesh was an illusion . . . But this holy-hypocrite secretly visited dentists where she insisted on massive doses of pain killers . . .
Mary Baker Eddy – 19th Century Bunny Boiler.
Surprisingly, the arch-cynic Mark Twain flirted with Christian Science then came to his senses and wrote a hilarious critique of the cult . . . For many decades, the Twain book was as rare-as-rocking-horse-shit coz Christian Scientists (on orders from the paranoid Mary Baker Eddy) found and destroyed copies . . .
The Jewish Communist traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty as hell of giving atomic secrets to Joseph Stalin
Uncle Joe was the second greatest mass murderer of the 20th century second only to that other commie-creep – Mao Zedong . . . Your correspondent laughs and cheers when he imagines the repulsive Julius and Ethel frying in the electric chair at Sing-Sing . . . To his everlasting credit, Judge Kaufman (the Rosenberg’s co-religionist) who presided at their trial blamed them for the deaths of 38,000 American soldiers in Korea . . . That war only happened coz Stalin was emboldened by the nuclear weapons he had acquired thanks to the secrets the Rosenberg scum had given him . . . Another of the Rosenberg’s co-religionists – Congressman Samuel Dickstein actually took money from Stalin to betray America . . . And still they kvetch when people question their loyalty . . .
The Rosenbergs doing their famous impression of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Since Lockdown more Brits have died from flu and pneumonia than from Covid-19 and that’s even accepting the massively exaggerated Covid death totals . . . On the other side of the pond, the New York Times reported that the most widely used Covid-19 test in America is returning 90% false positives . . . Say, don’t call me daffy, this Corona-hoax gets more apparent and preposterous by the day . . .
Here’s another hard-boiled homage to the two-fisted reporters of yesteryear – Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon.
Waaaiiittt a minute – first they told us to buy expensive masks with breathing valves coz simple masks wouldn’t stop Covid. Now they tell us to not buy masks with valves coz they spread the disease. Who’s in charge here? . . .
Coming soon – the “Anthony Fauci Signature Mask” guaranteed to cure what ails ya!
From its earliest days television was described as “chewing gum for the eyes” and “the idiot box” and “a vast wasteland.” All correct . . . My favorite description of TV is – “an electronic sewer-pipe in the corner of your living room.” Even the genteel NPR in the states and BBC in Britain are pumping genteel sewage into your brain. Turn ’em off . . .
Pass me the remote, will ya? Uh… on second thought…
Hey, if masculinity is so “toxic” why do so many lesbians pretend to be male and dress like traditional grooms . . .
“Do you take this man, uh, I mean pretend-man… oh, you figure it out.”
And why do they pretend to be super-butch males? Doesn’t that make them super-toxic? . . .
Hey, If masculinity is so “toxic” why would any woman want to “transition” to male? Answers on a postcard . . . Another question – If male to female transsexuals are returning their bodies to a “natural” state then why do they have to insert a dildo-like plastic tube into their manufactured vaginas for several hours a day to prevent their bodies from closing up and healing what it detects as an open bleeding wound? . . .
The colors are a nice touch, no?
When bluegrass bands play heavy metal and Motown music, it’s better than the originals . . . Southern, White Christian males are the only group in the world that we are allowed and even encouraged to mock . . . When people wearing Corona-masks flinch away from me, I want to beat them to a bloody pulp . . . In the 1960s, U.S. police departments came under massive Marxist attack over supposed police brutality against Blacks. The anti-Communist John Birch Society ran the counter-campaign: “Support Your Local Police and Keep Them Independent.” It made them a laughing stock . . .
I wonder how many Americans will laugh when their local police are defunded and replaced with a national Stasi?
Please explain this to me – The US & UK built many massive “Covid emergency centers” to handle the predicted overflow from hospitals. These facilities, boasting many thousands of beds, were unneeded and unused. They’ve been dismantled. But, hold up, from the beginning of the Covid-hoax we were warned of even deadlier second and third waves of the virus. If the powers-that-be actually believed this disaster was coming then why did they dismantle essential facilities mere months before Covid would return with a vengeance? . . . The big band leader Stan Kenton had an incestuous relationship with his daughter that lasted from her pre-teen years to young womanhood . . .
She’s written a book claiming it wasn’t all bad. Hmmmnnn . . .
Is it me or are more female teachers banging their students these days? . . . British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is such a racial mongrel even he doesn’t know what he is . . . BoJo wants to import 3.5 million Chinese from Hong Kong at a time of unprecedented UK unemployment and economic crisis . . . Maybe our boy is Chinese, too? . . . How do the Chinese pay him off? . . .
Take 3.5 million from Column A and 3.5 million from Column B.
The Empire State Building was a flop for decades and was dubbed The Empty State Building . . . Even before Corona and the riots, I knew that Trumpowitz was gonna lose the election coz the demographics were against him in Florida, Arizona and Georgia. He had the right impulse about Corona i.e. let it burn through and develop herd immunity but then he listened to President Kushner and surrendered to the hysteria. Then he listened again to President Kushner and didn’t crack down on the riots immediately. He’s making a few tough tweets now but it’s too late. He’s gonna have no convention, no rallies and no second term . . .
President Kushner keeping an eye on his puppet.
The spectacularly corrupt and stupid Biden will win but he will be a figurehead and so will his incompetent female Black VP whoever she is . . . America will be ruled by a cabal of Marxists with Obama pulling the strings . . . Bader-Ginsburg will resign with much fanfare and spike the football on her way out. The Marxists will get to appoint at least two other justices. Then they will abolish the electoral college, open the borders, open the prisons, pass amnesty and bankrupt the country . . . When Trumpstein appeared, I said that he wasn’t important but what he represented and who came after him were. I also said that he would fail but that his failure would be useful. It would set the stage for a genuine White Nationalist leader to emerge. This coming leader who is yet unknown will operate outside of electoral politics. He will be a strongman in the mold of Caesar or Franco . . .
Barring his arrival, Whites in America will be lucky to be living in something akin to South Africa. The situation in Europe and the UK is equally bleak.
During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s more Communists were killed by other Communists than by Franco’s forces . . . Stalin saw that war as a chance to finally clean out the Trotskyites . . . The Gospel Quartets and Quintets of the 1940s and 50s were pure rock & roll, doo-wop and soul. Listen to the Swan Silvertones and the Soul Stirrers and you’ll hear it . . .
Claude Jeter of the Silvertones was The Man!
Meanwhile, White gospel singer Kenny Hinson could have been a massive country music star if he’d wanted to be. He had one of the great voices in American music!
I’ve never bought any music by The Beatles or Bob Dylan . . . Cardinal Spellman of New York was called the American Pope. He was also a predatory homosexual who cruised gay bars in Gotham accompanied by famous homos of the theater. These lavender lads all favored young Black meat . . . The Cardinal was also a rabid hawk. It’s said he spent more time on his knees in Viet Nam servicing GIs than praying . . .
Franny Spellman in full drag. Say a prayer for the altar boys!
Tony Blair’s Labour Party promoted 24/7 drinking in pubs and widespread gambling so I guess it really did care about the health and welfare of the White working class; or was it that Blair took money from scumbags who made their fortunes by selling gambling, alcohol and tobacco to the White working class? . . . Hookers will tell you that often their johns just want to talk about their wives and children . . . The Arabic word for African is “slave” . . . Millions more Africans were enslaved by Muslim countries than by the Christian world . . .
Muslims chopped off the penis and testicles of their African slaves.
Saudi Arabia didn’t outlaw slavery until 1962 . . . Millions more Africans were enslaved by Brazil than by the USA . . . Brazil didn’t outlaw slavery until decades after the USA did . . . Most of the slave ships and slave markets were owned and run by Jews . . . How come Black Lives Matter isn’t protesting outside Brazilian, Israeli and Islamic embassies? . . . My favorite true-crime cases are Lizzie Borden, Sam Sheppard and Jeffrey MacDonald . . .
Lizzie was guilty as hell. The murder house is now a B & B.
Dr. Sam was innocent. The poor bastard ended up as a pro-wrestler.
The jury is still out on MacDonald who is rotting in prison. The film maker Errol Morris is convinced MacDonald is innocent. You decide.
The father of singer Harry Connick, Jr. was a New Orleans D.A. accused of covering up the JFK assassination . . . The father of actor Woody Harrelson was a Texas hitman who many believe was one of the mysterious “Three Tramps” arrested behind the Grassy Knoll on the day JFK was hit . . .
“Daddy, is that you?”
Abraham Lincoln opposed expanding slavery into the West not because he was opposed to slavery but because he was opposed to spreading Blacks further into America . . .
Not so honest Abe didn’t free the slaves in the North.
Lincoln’s last meeting in The White House was with Black leaders to decide how and where to repatriate or resettle the freed slaves – Africa, South America and part of Texas were considered . . .
Here’s another hard-boiled homage to the two-fisted reporters of yesteryear – Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon.
The White liberals who cry and march for George Floyd would shit their pants and call the cops if he came near them . . . Abbott’s Frozen Custard in Rochester, N.Y. is the best in the universe – end of story . . . Margaret Sanger, the unhinged founder of Planned Parenthood, attended seances to contact the dead children she had abandoned . . .
Maggie was an unfaithful wife, a lethal mother and a Rosicrucian.
Is there a more annoying song than Hey Jude? . . . Whites are fleeing US cities at a record clip. So desperate are they to escape the coming race war that they are buying houses in rural America sight-unseen . . .
And people wonder why they flee.
The electric vibrator was invented to save the wrists and fingers of 19th century psychiatrists who spent much of their time masturbating neurotic, middle-class women to calm them down . . .
The straightjacket was used to prevent the insane from masturbating themselves bloody . . . The Kellogg Brothers were 7th Day Adventist fanatics who invented cold cereal as an anti-masturbation food . . .
God knows what these kinky bastards were up to!
If the Chinese ever get the whip hand in America the Blacks will scream, “Come back, Whitey. All is forgiven!” . . . Other Orientals call the Chinese, “The Jews of the Orient” . . . Next time you’re in New York avoid Little Italy; there are no Italians left and the food is poison . . . But visit the nearby Tenement Museum to experience the “White privilege” enjoyed by European immigrants . . . Mickey Mantle, the great Yankee ballplayer, dropped out of the 1961 home run race with Roger Maris coz he got an infection from a botched VD injection . . .
“The Mick” bragged that he led the league every year in the clap.
Mickey got his clap shots from the same “Dr. Feelgood” who injected JFK, Nixon and most of Hollywood and Washington. We still don’t know what the good doctor was putting in his “vitamin” shots . . . Question: Does anyone actually read Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou? . . .
Many episodes of the classic sitcom Bilko were written by Neil Simon.
They were filmed in an old open-air silent film studio on a Bronx rooftop that had been enclosed for TV use . . .
The iconic 1950s pin-up Bettie Page appeared on Bilko.
I never liked or believed Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas or Rock Hudson . . . Lancaster was in Harvey Weinstein’s league as a sexual predator . . . The Broadway composer Richard Rodgers was another notorious sex creep . . .
If you didn’t fuck Mr. Rodgers you didn’t get into one of his squeaky clean musicals.
In the early 20th century, Atlanta was the center of silent film production. Then the Jewish movie moguls fled to the West Coast to avoid paying patent money to the gentile Thomas Edison . . . I don’t care what vegans say, there’s nuthin’ better in life than a rare prime rib with a baked potato and salad . . . Lucca and Gubbio are my favorite Italian towns. And, you can give me Siena over Florence every time . . . How can it make sense to social distance getting on and off a plane but sit cheek by jowl on the flight? Youth wants to know . . . George Floyd did five years for holding a gun to a pregnant Black woman’s stomach while his partners in crime stole everything she had . . . When’s the last time you saw a man smoking a pipe? . . .
Do yourself a favor and have breakfast at Ruth’s Diner in Salt Lake City.
Laurence Olivier’s Richard the Third is so good it hurts. He based his villainous make-up on the vile Broadway producer Jed Harris and the Big Bad Wolf . . .
The vile Jed Harris.
The Big Bad Wolf
See what I mean?
Ya think Rush Limbaugh will grow a pair before he dies and tell the truth about Jewish power and influence in America? . . . The great “commie-killer” Senator Joseph McCarthy is the most vilified and lied about figure in American history. He was rough but he was right. And the decrypted Cold War messages sent from the Soviet Union to its Washington embassy prove how right he was . . .
McCarthy’s friends John and Robert Kennedy served on his anti-communist committees.
Be-bop sucks and Charlie Parker is the most over-rated figure in American popular music . . . Tell me something, why do so many doctors wear bow ties? . . .
Coney Island circa 1900 – 1960 was even better then you can imagine. Forced integration and race riots killed it
Read Bruce Jay Friedman! He’s a darker Woody Allen and a funnier Philip Roth. He’ll make ya laugh and wince at the same time . . . Dames with spaces between their front teeth are instantly endearing . . . Women shouldn’t be cops, firemen or soldiers and men who serve must meet stricter height and fitness requirements . . . The Antifa-BLM riots revealed how out of shape our police and National Guard have become . . .
Here’s that militarized police you’ve been hearing about!
Most of the Old Testament stories including Adam and Eve and Noah and the Ark were stolen from the Egyptians and Assyrians then cut and pasted together . . . The chief Biblical redactor was a female scribe in the court of King David . . . With any luck I’ll go to my grave without having read Marcel Proust or J.K. Rowling . . . In his best moments, Jerry Lewis was as funny as anyone. The rest of the time I want to slap him. Same with Lou Costello . . .
Abbott and CostelloMeet Frankenstein is a very, very funny movie.
The Empire State Building was built in one year in the depths of the Depression! One year! Think about that! . . . Homeopathy and chiropractic are quackery and so is “European-style” osteopathy. But American osteopaths are actual doctors. Their medical schools haven’t been devalued with affirmative action admissions. So, if you’re in America and want a good doctor get an osteopath. He’ll have OD after his name . . . German Village in Columbus, Ohio is the prettiest neighborhood in America . . . Abstract-Expressionism was funded by the C.I.A. and like “conceptual” art it is nothing but a money laundering scam . . .
Paid for with your tax dollars!
Correction
In my last post, I wrote that the comic Mort Sahl said, “Lenny Bruce knew people use The Prophet by Gibran to get laid.” Not so. Lenny said it himself . . . But Mort did have the brilliant line, “In my younger days, I dated actresses and other female impersonators” . . . But enough about Meghan Markle.
I grew up in New York City in the 1950s – the last gasp of the Golden Age of newspaper columnists. These were the “gents room” journalists who sported trench coats and fedoras, smoked cigars and drank rye.
Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon were the “big beasts” whose columns brimmed with opinion, gossip, lies and even some facts. These one-finger typists wrote hard-boiled rants ripe with street smarts and sentimentality. They gave readers the lowdown on Broadway and City Hall and the straight skinny on Harlem and Wall Street.
Winchell was so hated and feared that no one attended his funeral.
Cannon was the quintessential sports reporter who also wrote about dames and daiquiris.
Winchell and Cannon punctuated their column items with three dots that captured the look and rhythm of machine gun bullet holes. Like this . . .
Here then is my homage to Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon . . .
George Floyd was a violent career criminal and this reporter won’t miss his sorry ass one little bit . . . All women with pink hair and tattoos are skanks . . . I hate Oreos – always have, always will . . . If there’s a funnier writer in the English language than Charles Portis, I haven’t read him . . . If the world is facing an existential threat from Covid-19 then why in hell are any planes allowed to fly anywhere anytime anyhow? . . . Buddy Guy and Dolly Parton are the most charismatic live performers I’ve ever seen. No one even comes close. . .
Without Buddy there’d be no Hendrix, no Clapton, no Stevie Ray.
She’s a force of nature on stage.
George Floyd killed himself with a drug OD. He had enough Fentanyl in him to stop a horse and Fentanyl creates the delusion that you can’t breathe even though you can . . . The pulp crime writers Henry and Frank Kane (no relation) are better than Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. So is Ed McBain . . . The smell of flowers reminds me of death . . . Why do gay men always say “Miss” Judy Garland and “Miss” Peggy Lee?. . . Wanna know how and why the world was stampeded into Corona-panic? Read: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. He nailed it in 1841. That’s right – 1841 . . .
Mackay knew that most people are sheeple.
Mackay didn’t foresee the rise of the fake news media and its ethos of “If it bleeds, it leads.” The more frightened the sheeple are the more they watch TV and the more the media can charge for commercials.
Mainstream Jewish newspapers and organizations have bragged that Antifa is a Jewish revolutionary movement with roots in the Russian revolution and that any criticism of Antifa is anti-Semitic. So… by their own proud admission the Jews are behind this attempt at a violent overthrow of the US. Blacks are just their puppets.
Wait a minute… is that a six pointed star?
Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in high speed, comic-flow are as good as it will ever get . . . Climate change is a hoax designed to transfer wealth from White to Brown people . . . I’ve never met a good-looking commie – male or female . . . All Hassidic Jews smell faintly of garlic . . . Virtue signalling Whites who support Black Lives Matter should move to Gary, Indiana or Camden, New Jersey to demonstrate they are truly “down with the struggle” . . . The jazz singer Johnny Hartman was the best of the “Sepia Sinatras” but he often strayed painfully off pitch . . .
Alas, no autotune in Johnny’s heyday.
The accordion and the zither should be outlawed . . . Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is over-priced slop. Breyer’s ice cream is the best in the world . . . New Mexico policeman Lonnie Zamora didn’t see a crashed UFO in the desert. What he stumbled upon was the NASA testing of a moon landing craft . . .
And the training astronauts looked like Little Green Men.
The FBI infiltrated and controlled many of the UFO cults and contactee groups of the 1950s . . .
Some like Uriel were harmless loons.
Others like George Adamski were conscious frauds. But they were all watched, studied and manipulated.
Why are male psychics almost always swishy queens? . . . All imitation meat products promoted by vegetarians taste like a miscarriage on cardboard . . .
Is this before or after this “meat” has passed through the body processes?
Most of Lenny Bruce’s jokes don’t hold up but his routines about liberal hypocrisy get better with time . . .
White BLM supporters should be forced to listen to Lenny’s routine, “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties.”
Mort Sahl, Bruce’s main competition, was never funny or dangerous . . .
Sahl had one great line though. He said, “Lenny Bruce knew that people use The Prophet to get laid.”
American acting never recovered from the pseudo-Freudian, method acting pushed in post-war NYC acting schools by left-wing Jews who flunked Psych 101 . . .
Montgomery Clift was the worst example of this constipated style of acting. I always want to smack him and scream, “Just say the fuckin’ line already”. . . Steve Cochran on the other hand was a terrific actor. A real hell raiser. No mamby-pamby method acting bunk in his performances . . .
Here’s Steve helping a young actress with her breathing exercises. Whata guy!
The two convicted Black felons apprehended with George Floyd didn’t resist arrest and are alive . . . The FBI’s secret recording of the right-wing militia leader Joseph Milteer weeks before the JFK assassination is proof that people knew Kennedy was about to to be hit. The tapes are on youtube . . .
Milteer mentions shooting JFK with a rifle from an office building and that a patsy had been set-up.
Simple proof of a second gunman in Dealey Plaza is the cadence of the shots reported by everyone no matter how many total shots they heard. The cadence goes… BANG… BANGBANG. There is no way Oswald could have fired his bolt action rifle twice that quickly.
BANGBANG = second gunman
Bobby Kennedy never believed the Warren Commission . . . There was a second gunman in the hotel kitchen shooting at Bobby, too . . . There is intriguing evidence linking Canada’s wealthy Bronfman family to the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations . . .
This Dick Powell movie from 1951 about an attempted assassination of Lincoln holds a chilling coincidence about the JFK assassination. Watch it and see.
Ginger Rogers was a great dancer but she was also the most underrated actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age . . . Since being turned over to Black rule, South Africa has become an ungovernable shit hole . . . The same goes for Haiti where Blacks slaughtered the Whites and mulattoes over 200 years ago. The result? Port-au-Prince is the only capital city in the world without a sewage system . . .
Freed from evil White domination, Haitians eat cookies made from dirt.
I don’t care what aficionados say, the Edsel was ugly . . . Lili St. Cyr was the sexiest of the old-time strippers . . .
Lili would start her act in a bath and get dressed on stage. A reverse strip! Clever or what?
Malcolm X was a pimp who sold Black women to White men. He then had sex with men in prison. Maybe he liked it coz his wife complained that he was a flop in bed. Most of the tough-guy exploits in his best selling autobiography are the invention of Alex Haley who later plagiarized a White man’s novel and called it Roots. Haley settled with the original writer out of court . . .
Mrs. X was later burned to death by Malcolm’s grandson. Then Malcolm’s daughter and granddaughter were arrested for animal cruelty and auto theft. Then his son was murdered in Mexico for refusing to pay a big bar bill he’d run up buying drinks for hookers. The Waltons they ain’t.
Louis Farrakhan the leader of the Nation of Islam is a Scientologist and a Mason. How does he remember which funny hat to wear and handshake to use? . . .
The Nation of Islam has published brilliant studies of the part Jews played in the slave trade and of the Leo Frank murder case. These books are banned by amazon but Jeff Bezos will sell you other books that claim to debunk the books written by the Nation of Islam. Hmmmnnnn…
Leo Frank was guilty as hell. He raped and murdered Mary Phagan and threw her down an elevator shaft. Frank was a sweatshop owner, rapist and murderer. Mary Phagan was only 13 so Frank was also a pedophile . . .
Mary Phagan before she met that nice Mr. Frank.
Mary Phagan after she met that nice Mr. Frank.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded to defend Leo Frank. Its lawyers blamed the rape and murder on two innocent Black men who worked for Frank. You won’t learn this in Parade the Broadway musical about the case or in the many biased TV movies. Hey, remind me – who controls Broadway and TV? . . .
I love reading good books – especially good books set in New York. I’m guessing you do to or you wouldn’t be here. And, I’m guessing that, like me, you love discovering book stores built over basements bursting with used books and then hunting and coughing your way through the dusty stacks.
I even have a recurring dream of descending into an imagined basement in a Manhattan slum and finding the used book store of my dreams. (Literally of my dreams.) For years, I’ve been returning to this seemingly limitless catacomb.
The great joy of being a book hunter is stumbling over a new author, subject or world. Here are some of my most treasured discoveries –
Psychic Dictatorship in America
by Gerald B. Bryan (1940)
Guy and Edna Ballard – the Bonnie & Clyde of the Occult
An insider’s exposé of The Mighty I Am. This spiritualist cult was popular in the 1930s and is still around. The money-mad Ballards gave birth to many imitators and set the template for the entire New Age movement complete with fairies, fruitcakes and frauds. On orders from the Ascended Masters, adherents murdered their pets. No foolin’.
Instantaneous Personal Magnetism
by Edmund Shaftesbury (1933)
“Look into my eyes, stop fidgeting and remove your wet clothes… ”
Tips published by the International Magnetism Club based in Manchester, England. Chock full of lifesaving information on nerve tensing, magnetic foods, wet clothes, thin shoes and fidgets. Hey, these guys were from Manchester and that’s good enough for me. Betcha they were Masons, too.
Adventures with Vending Machines
by Ray Burkett (1967)
Vending sun tans in the 1940s. And, people doubt that man landed on the moon.
The “straight skinny” from one-who-knows on how to make millions stocking gumball machines in garages and paperback book racks in drug stores. With special chapters on, condom vending machines, pay toilets, the salted-in-the-shell peanut racket and the ever-fraught subject of vending in negro locations.
Analism Among the Poor
by Preston Harriman(1970)
Part of Harriman’s multi-volume indictment of class struggle and lube.
Harriman’s oeuvre includes: Analism Among the Poor, Analism Among the Rich, Anal Girl, From Adultery to Analism and Oral Aunts. (Preston was either hungry for a change of pace, or had a very friendly aunt.) Sadly, I’ve found only the one work by Harriman but I live in hope. Still, I’m not sure I’d shake his hand at a book signing.
And you thought I was kidding!
But what does all this have to do with Joe the Engineer, I hear you cry. This –
You know how it is – your moving down the used book aisle, head tilted sideways, giving yourself scoliosis, scanning the book spines when a title catches your interest. You never heard of the author. The cover and blurbs intrigue you. You read the first sentence and next thing you know the clerk is telling you the store is closing. You blow the mildew from your lungs, brush the cobwebs from your clothes and head up to the cashier clutching gold-in-print.
That’s how I found Joe the Engineer by Chuck Wachtel (1983). I stumbled over it in the used book basement of the original Sam Weller’s in Salt Lake City. I found Francine Prose, David Markson, Charles Portis, Sam Lypsyte and Tom Perrotta in similar basements around the world. (They haven’t written any “Brooklyn” books so I’m not featuring them on this blog. But, if you are a fan of dazzling prose, do yourself a favor and read them. Trust me. Just do it.)
Anyone who has read my memoir Boy Outa Brooklyn will know that my opinion of the neighboring Borough of Queens is not high. Since Wachtel’s book is set in that hellhole, it’s not a “Brooklyn” book. But, since I grew up surrounded by “Joe the Engineers” and might have been one myself, and since it validates everything I’ve written about Queens and since it is so damn good and since this is my blog and I can do whatever I wanna do – I’m gonna do you a favor by making it my Brooklyn Book # 5. (So there.)
Joe the Engineer is quite simply one of the truest and most moving novels of working-class life ever written. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Chuck the Wachtel
Joe is a Vietnam vet stuck in a dead-end job reading meters in Queens basements and living in Richmond Hill – the same dead-end Queens neighborhood where he grew up.
Joe’s Richmond Hill, Queens is the evil twin my South Brooklyn.
Joe is saddled with half-assed intelligence and half-assed dreams. And, Wachtel does a masterful job of capturing the mind of a person who isn’t fully conscious of the “how and why” of his miserable state but senses that something is wrong somewhere. The working class is full of such “canaries in a coal mine.” The media loves to mock them when they are inarticulate in their rage and confusion but I’ve always heard them loud and clear.
I’ve heard them because I am one of them. My antenna has always been finely attuned to pick up snide condescension from the elites. (That’s what cost Hillary Clinton the election. White workers ain’t dumb ya know.) So, I appreciated how “working-class Wachtel” applied his writer’s eye to our shared caste without snobbery or sentimentality.
I especially enjoyed listening to Joe’s thoughts as he read his customer’s lives while reading their basement meters. I saw him as a blue-collar Howard Carter mining the minutiae of ancient Egyptian life from hieroglyphs though in Joe’s case it is from ancient wall calendars and broken toys.
In one exquisitely painful passage, the unhappily married Joe has a disastrous one-night-stand with a supermarket checkout girl.
I found a 1983 radio interview with Wachtel – the year Joe was published. I was pleased but not surprised to learn that one of Chuck’s literary models was Hubert Selby Jr. whose Last Exit to Brooklyn is one of my Brooklyn Books. I was less pleased and surprised that Wachtel sounded prissy and academic. And when he blithely stated that America was a “mulatto” nation, my antenna started twitching. “Mulatto” is code for White genocide. It’s shorthand for “Death to Joe the Engineer.”
Happily, in 2020, “mulatto” is still not the norm in America and race-mixing is frowned upon by the vast majority of all races. (Don’t believe me? Listen to minority talk radio.) And, it was certainly not the rule fifty years ago despite Wachtel’s best wishes. However, due to the subversive work of those condescending elites (whom Wachtel chastised) and their fellow-travellers like, ironically, Chuck Wachtel himself, the Joe the Engineers of Richmond Hill and the world are being replaced.
Joe’s parents circa 1950
The couple who bought Joe’s parent’s house. Ya think they have racial consciousness?
Yes, the solidly White working-class Richmond Hill, Queens to which Joe returned after being used as cannon fodder in Viet Nam is now not open to his kind. For Richmond Hill, Queens is now known as Little India-Guyana-Trinidad and Tobago.
Richmond Hill circa 2050. Who needs water meters when there’s no water?
I eagerly sought out and read Wachtel’s other works which include poetry but, for me, Chuck is a one-hit-wonder. Still, as with those other liberal half-wits I’ve reviewed, Alfred Kazin and Pete Hamill, I’m gonna cut Chuck Wachtel some slack coz he wrote a beauty. Do yourself a favor – read it!
There seems to be a movie in the works but I fear they’ll kill the book with politically correct crap. Betcha the supermarket check out girl is Black or Muslim. And, probably cast with Chuck’s approval. Never mind – “I hereby pronounce Joe the Engineer an honorary Brooklyn Boy.”
Why do the best “tough-guy” writers always look like Geography teachers?
The late Thomas Boyle was a Pennsylvania kid who spent part of his childhood in Brooklyn. (That makes him an Honorary Brooklyn Boy in my opinion.) He graduated from Cornell, earned his doctorate at NYU and taught at Brooklyn College for many years. Some book review sites confuse him with the more famous T.C. Boyle the author of many brilliant novels including The Road to Wellville – set in a 19th century health-spa and Drop City – set in an Alaskan hippie commune.
Our Thomas Boyle’s last book (published in 1990 in the midst of his crime trilogy) was Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead – a study of Victorian crime fiction. It sounds like the Sherlock Holmes mystery Conan Doyle forgot to write! I’ve added it to my “must read” list.
Any fan of gumshoe fiction will enjoy Boyle’s modern yet faithful reworking of the much-loved archetypes and plot devices of that often hackneyed genre.
Anyone who knows the geography of Brooklyn will get an extra kick out of Boyle’s locales. His hard-boiled tales follow Detective Frank DeSales as he chases bad guys down hidden alleys in Red Hook, across garbage strewn vacant lots in Williamsburgh and even onto the hallowed ground of Green-Wood Cemetery.
If you like Lawrence Block’s ex-cop now “private dick” Matt Scudder, you’ll feel right at home with Thomas Boyle’s active duty detective Frank DeSales. They are brothers from another mother.
“On the job”
I can’t find any movies or TV shows based on this trilogy which is a shame and surprising. For decades now, “All things Brooklyn” have been all the rage. Go know!
My discovery of Brooklyn literature began here. In fact, I still have an overdue book from this branch. Hey, I remember that car!
Any list of famous writers from Brooklyn would fill a decent sized phone book. And any list of books set in Brooklyn would be almost as large. I’ve read plenty of both but there are many more I’ve missed. So, the posts I’ll be making about Brooklyn books will be far from a definitive list. Think of them as tips from your friendly Brooklyn librarian.
It would be remiss of me not to begin with the very first “Brooklyn” book I ever read. (Hell, it was the very first book I ever read cover-to-cover!) And, I’ve reread it many times since – most recently last Tuesday. In fact, it’s the overdue book mentioned above – overdue for over 60 years! If you haven’t read it then all I can say is, “I pity you!”
The life & loves, wit & wisdom, trials & tribulations of the inimitable “Scooter” – Hall of Fame Yankee shortstop and broadcaster. And, it goes without saying quintessential Brooklyn Boy.
“Psssst, hey kid, ya wanna read a really doity book?”
As you drive into Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge a large sign looms up at you. It screams, “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” If a driver doesn’t take that exit they are taken onto the Gowanus Expressway and thence over the neighborhood of Sunset Park where the spectacularly downbeat novel Last Exit to Brooklyn is set. In the 1950s, the period of the novel, that sign should have screamed, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
In the 50s, the waterfront of Sunset Park was a land of perpetual night – a slum rotting in fetid shadow beneath the elevated Gowanus Expressway. The Mafia had killed the docks, Robert Moses had killed Sunset Park by cutting it in two with his hideous highway and the Dodgers had killed Brooklyn by moving to L.A.
Hubert Selby Jr. knew this coz he was a Brooklyn boy born right next door to Sunset Park in Bay Ridge.
Industry City – another flop by Robert Moses & FDR. It’s now a gentrified flea market. Hey, I remember those cars, too.
Selby’s book consists of inter-locking tales of losers, junkies, sadists, pimps, hookers and trannies who fight for scraps in a nightmare world of gangs and gang-bangs.
Vying for the title of Miss Gowanus Expressway
I was raised in the 1950s just a few blocks away from this world. I even swam in the public pool there. But, I knew better than to venture into the Terra Incognita below the highway. Many years later, I met a Yorkshireman who had lived in a sleaze-bag hotel in Sunset Park during WW2. He was outfitting ships to British standards that had been built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He told me that the whole area was full of crap games, gyp-joints and whorehouses all making a fortune from the servicemen and dock workers.
They all hadda get drunk and they all hadda get laid.
They all hadda get drunk and they all… Hey, dig those crazy saddle shoes!
In the 1980s, I would spend pointless, penniless weekends meandering around Brooklyn by bike. I was drawn to the derelict and rotting factories of Industry City that lined the waterfront in Sunset Park. I thought, “Damn, this would make a great film set.” And, that’s exactly where, a few years later, much of the movie of Last Exit to Brooklyn was filmed.
In the 80s, it was just me, my bike and tumbleweeds.
That film is good but doesn’t capture the daring style and outrageous vitality of Selby’s prose. Plus, by 1989, much of the shock value of his book’s subject matter had been lost. But, when it was first published in 1964, Last Exit to Brooklyn was an outrage and banned in several countries. I haven’t been impressed by Selby’s other work but anyone interested in the lower depths of Brooklyn life and the heights of “outsider” American literature should read Last Exit to Brooklyn.
In 1965, I read it as a 15-year-old while working as a messenger in Times Square. The guy who sold it to me could have been arrested. I made sure that its instantly recognizable cover was always visible sticking out of my back pocket as I made deliveries. And, I made sure that same cover was visible as I read Last Exit to Brooklyn on the subway. I didn’t live in a artist’s garret in Greenwich Village but it was fun to pretend that I did.
Suiting up for another graveyard shift at the Grand Central Station P.O.
The Christmas blues of 1970 morphed into the January blues of 1971. I and my fellow “cultural casualties” of the 1960s having dropped out of college and dropped far too many psychedelics were facing the prospect of a lifetime of blue-collar work in the Post Office.
Yeah, yeah, it was a job-for-life with uniform and pension but not quite what we had envisioned for ourselves just a few years before. Back in college we were going to be actors, writers, musicians, poets, painters, philosophers even. But, the luster had faded from our Age of Aquarius fantasies as it had from the few sorry strands of Christmas tinsel that hung from atop the mail sorting coops.
We were a motley crew but not without our talents and charms. Alex was a half-assed genius and chess master. Mark was a poet and fluent in Latin. Murray was a killer wit and killer blues guitarist. Sandy was trying to decipher the hidden codes in Dylan’s lyrics. And, Charles, our only Black member, was trying to convert everyone at the Post Office to 7th Day Adventism and vegetarianism. We were all from working class families and had discovered to our shock and horror that unless something miraculous happened we would not escape the gravitational pull of our caste. So, we embraced our fate.
Our new self-image and style
As if on cue and without any spoken agreement, we took to wearing plaid, flannel work shirts, tattered jeans, garrison belts and battered work boots. We cut our freakish hair back to a moderately radical length. Less Woodstock. More Workers of the World. We trimmed our facial hair to Lenin length. And, we embraced the Grateful Dead’s album Workingman’s Dead as if it were written only for us. After all, we were nothing if not workingmen.
A great album even if you’re not working.
One of the worst aspects of being a trainee mail-sorter was that we weren’t guaranteed hours. If the mail dried up we were sent home. And, this often happened shortly after we had clocked on for our graveyard shift. There we’d be in midtown Manhattan at Midnight having planned to be up all night and having ingested amphetamines to help us be up all night but suddenly with no reason to be up all night. Luckily, Alex lived in a nearby East Side tenement so we’d pick up some munchies and beer and head over to his pad, there to smoke hash and listen to Workingman’s Dead till dawn’s early light. Or, at least, till Alex’s neighbors banged on the walls. We named ourselves the Dead Workingmen. (Okay, not that clever but we needed all the help we could get.)
Suddenly, it became embarrassingly clear that Tony, one of our Supervisors, was madly in love with Sandy. I don’t think this burly Italian knew he was gay and he certainly wasn’t swishy in any way. But, goddamn, he was as queer as a three-dollar bill for Sandy. Lovesick Tony was eager to demonstrate to Sandy how powerful he was by how many favors he could do for him. One big problem. If he gave Sandy a break he had to give it to all of the Dead Workingmen or his cover would be blown. We teased Sandy mercilessly about his conquest but he still generously connived to use his charm over Tony to the group’s advantage i.e. without “coming across” for the Italian Stallion, Sandy kept him sweet on our behalf.
“Hey, I love you, Sandy. You got a problem wit dat?”
Some nights Sandy would persuade Tony to let us get lost for a few hours. We’d head over to Alex’s while still on the clock and then sneak back in at 8AM to punch out. Some nights at Sandy’s behest Tony would let us hide and sleep on the filthy mailbags piled out on the loading dock. Other nights he’d put us on parcel sorting duty – a welcome break from the din and dementia of the sorting coops.
We’d stand before rows of open mailbags and practice our basketball jump shots tossing boxes into the bags. Sometimes we even read the addresses and aimed for the right mail bag. Sometimes we even made a basket. But, truth to tell, we didn’t give a shit. We had come to hate the mail itself. Mark once tickled his throat until he vomited into the tray of mail he was sorting. (I know, I know, disgusting. But, you gotta understand that 99.999999% of the mail we were sorting was junk mail. And, the rest was going to Reverend Ike!)
Time Clock Confidential
“Oh yeah, punch this.”
I don’t know if anyone actually punches a time clock anymore. But when I first joined the world-of-work as a teenager, I was angered by the demeaning nature of this act. I was even more angered by the grown-ups who loitered by the time clock waiting for it to tick to a specific second so they could get a few paltry shekels more in their meagre pay envelopes. I was embarrassed for them and hated how they compared stories of time clock victories and defeats and of famous “time clock jockeys” of yesteryear. ThePost Office was full of these lifers who stared in amazement and clucked with disdain as I strode past them and punched out without even looking at the hour hand. Wage slaves. Not me.
The Dead Workingmen hard at work.
Meanwhile back at the Tony-Sandy love affair things became waaaay too strange and sad for this trainee mail-sorter. It happened one night when members of the Dead Workingmen were surreptitiously tapped on the shoulder and told to report to Tony’s office. There we discovered the other invited guests were the usually unfriendly Supervisors. Tony had set up a movie projector and hung a sheet on the wall. He greeted us conspiratorially then locked the door, turned off the lights and showed us a stag movie i.e. the type of fuck-film that was usually confiscated if sent in the U.S Mail. I wondered if this film had been caught by an eagle-eyed postal dick and turned over to Tony.
As the silent, grainy, 8MM black and white film unspooled on the stained sheet, the air in the room became noxious with nervous laughter, unfunny quips and cigar smoke. We’d been invited to a classic “smoker.” The film showed a singularly unattractive couple reclining on a singularly uncomfortable table and fucking in a singularly unenthusiastic manner. Watching their coitus was as erotic as watching the piston action on a Ford V8. But, I sensed that a bizarre male-bonding ritual was at play. The Supers wanted to show us that they weren’t such bad guys after all. Hey, they were like our fathers and uncles – just a bunch of older working-class fellas who liked watching fuck-films with a bunch of younger working-class fellas. This secret screening was an olive branch extended across the generations and a sort of test.
Would we make the grade and join their ranks of Merry (albeit horny) Mailmen?
Also, except for Charles, we were all White as were the Supers. I sensed they wanted to find racial solidarity with us since they spent so much time with obese Black women with whom they shared little cultural interest. Least of all watching fuck-films.
I’m sure that shrinks would highlight what they’d claim was clear homo-eroticism in this sweat-lodge soiree. But, I don’t think that was what was going on with the Supers. Except for Tony. He turned on the projector, pushed me aside and sat next to Sandy. As the couple built to their inevitable climax we all watched in silence. Except for Tony. He giggled and elbowed Sandy while peppering him with questions in hushed rabid whisper.
“You believe the size of the cock on that guy?”
“Wait. Wait. She swallows the whole thing.”
“Look at that bush. You like hairy twat, Sandy?”
“Hey, Sandy, you ever put it in a girl’s ass?”
Then, after the “money shot” in which the on-screen stud splashed his semen all over his fair maiden’s belly Tony gushed – “Yeah, that’s the good part, right, Sandy?”
The Supers must have overheard Tony’s pillow talk but they didn’t react. Meanwhile, the Dead Workingmen shared looks of amused horror. Mainly horror. Then the lunch horn barked, the lights came on and with eyes cast downward we bolted out of there muttering, “Holy shit, what the fuck was that?!”
Shortly after that night I was fired for telling an especially sadistic Supervisor to go fuck himself. The union jumped to my defense assuming that I wanted to keep my job. At the mediation meeting the union rep was dumbstruck when I told all present that the United States Postal Service could sort my job where the sun don’t shine. I thought about throwing the porn party in their faces but didn’t coz I knew that would make big trouble for Tony and the Dead Workingmen I was leaving behind.
Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your jobs.
CODA
Ten years later while walking in the middle of nowhere on Staten Island, I ran into Murray. (What are the odds?) We recognized each other even though he was now as obese as his female Black co-workers. Yes, he was still at the Grand Central P.O. but he was now a Junior Supervisor. No, he wasn’t playing guitar anymore.
It was an awkward encounter and a painful one for him. Murray and I had come from similar working-class backgrounds, two Brooklyn boys who had arrived at the same point via similar paths. Then our paths diverged. I had followed my dream of being an actor. He had buried his of being a musician. We exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together. We never did.
When I was a little shaver, my mother told my siblings and me the heartwarming story of a mother with many children who had killed herself on Christmas Eve. She put her brood to bed with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads then turned on the gas oven and laid down under the Christmas tree among the presents. That’s the way her children found her on Christmas morn. As a child, I wondered how she could bear to kill herself before opening her presents. But, with every passing Yuletide, I understood more and more why that mother had checked out in such ghoulishly festive style.
Christmas is a burden. A time of testing. A time of taking stock. And, woe betide anyone who comes up short. The pressure to be happy is overwhelming. Everywhere there are the iconic images of Santa, sleigh bells and snow; everywhere the glowing fireplaces, twinkling trees; everywhere the perfectly wrapped presents and perfectly formed snowmen.
Christmas in South Brooklyn looked just like this. Honest.
And, the U.S. Post Office is one of the major purveyors of this Christmas myth via its nostalgic stamps and “mail early” missives. So, imagine my chagrin when December of 1970 found me working at the “Christmas coal-face” aka Grand Central Station Post Office – one of the largest Christmas card sorting offices in the world.
This was a time before emails, texting and twitter when people mailed each other Christmas cards to such an extent that the P.O. had to hire seasonal workers to handle the Xmas deluge. We sorters were buried under red and green envelopes for weeks and had to work tons of over time to make a dent in the never-ending flow.
I was then living in a dreary studio apartment in a dreary Brooklyn neighborhood without even a dreary girlfriend. Sadly, I couldn’t afford a Christmas tree to commit suicide under. (Hell, I could barely afford to pay my gas bill.) I needed the O.T. so I worked all the hours the P.O. threw at me. And, even though the Post Office closed for Christmas Day, I did have a shift on Christmas Eve.
That magical, candy cane night brought a heady party atmosphere to the usually grim sorting floor. The shift bosses cast off their usual Scrooge demeanours and donned elf hats and light-up reindeer horns. Most terrifying of all were the ancient workers (male and female) who stalked the sorting aisles brandishing sprigs of Mistletoe. These creeps had never smiled or spoken to me all year but were suddenly wagging their egg-nog-coated tongues in my direction.
The obese Black women who were “union-job-for-lifers” had years before commandeered certain sorting aisles as their private turf and held “INVITATION ONLY” office parties in them. They jealously guarded their paper plates covered with baloney and their Ritz crackers covered with aerosol cheese while they quaffed bottle after bottle of Colt 45 and Night Train.
What part of “INVITATION ONLY” don’t you understand?
Yeah, you could use this shit to write “Merry Christmas” on a cracka… er, I mean… cracker.
Meanwhile, an oldies radio station blasted the usual rock & roll “Christmas classics” on heavy rotation. It also played Air Force radar reports of a mysterious, manned flying object that was tracked leaving the North Pole and headed for New York.
Just shoot me.
When our 4AM lunch break came, we were called to an open area where many of us climbed atop the towering mail machinery and dangled from it like Marxists seizing the means of production.
The sadistic fat-fuck who ran this P.O. suddenly appeared in a cheap Santa suit and arm-twisted a few of the obese Black women to sit on his lap. This much racial fraternization was a rare thing in 1970s America. Cue: A rash of awkward jokes about negroes and Noel.
In the Hallmark movie version he would look like this.
But, this was the Grand Central Post Office version.
Mercifully, several other obese Black females appeared in full Gospel choir drag to serenade us with their screeched renditions of Silent Night and We Three Kings. They finished their set with a sing-a-long of White Christmas. Cue: more forced racial jokes.
In the Hallmark movie version they would be great but…
Then the back to work bell sounded putting an end to this Happy Holidays horror. At the end of my shift, I headed for the subway through a deserted Grand Central Station and wondered where I could buy a Christmas tree with gas jet attached.
