My Brooklyn friends and I obsess about the pockets of our gloves. We punch our gloves to deepen their pockets. We rub oil into our gloves to soften their leather. I get a catcher’s mitt one Christmas and mistakenly rub olive oil into it which makes it smell like leather lasagna. (When I find this mitt as an adult, I have an immediate craving for Chicken Tetrazzini.) For winter storage, we wrap our gloves tightly around a baseball so that, come spring, the pockets will be deeper than ever. We brag about the depth of our baseball glove pockets. We don’t have penis envy. We have pocket envy.
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.
Even before the hit song by the Village People, everyone knew what went on at the YMCA. But, after a day walking around the streets of Manhattan and a night running around the moors of Scotland, I was too whipped to care. Plus, the “Y” was only minutes from the theater and Jersey wasn’t. So, I risked it. But, getting a room at the “Y” was not easy. It was a popular place for young Christian men to fellowship, evangelize and sodomize. The line at the check-in desk looked like a casting call for The Boys in the Band.
I’ll say one thing for these young Christian lads, they lived by the motto, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
So, I counted my blessings whenever I could get a four-dollar room with the all-important private shower. I felt like a real swell as I piled all the furniture against the door to dissuade unwanted visitors and watched Johnny Carson in glorious Black & White. For two bucks, I could get a private room but with a gang shower down the hall. One catch. There were nightly gangbangs in the gang shower. So, on two-buck nights, I’d wait until 4 AM when the orgy had finished then tiptoe down the hall and take a shower – fully clothed. For a buck, the “Y” supplied a bunk bed and a butt-plug.
The Mermaid Tavern not to be confused with the Chelsea Bar.
The cast of Macbeth drank in an 8th avenue dive called the Chelsea Bar, not to be confused with the bar of the same name in the nearby Chelsea Hotel where celebrities went to OD on heroin. No, our Chelsea Bar was a beer & shot joint that catered to longshoremen and merchant seamen. We liked the Chelsea because the beer was cheap and the ambiance earthy – our very own Mermaid Tavern. The toothless, one-thumbed bartender liked us because we bought a lot of his beer and caused no trouble. He was not the only person in the Chelsea missing a body part – all the regulars were minus a finger, arm, ear or eye. They were the guys who didn’t pay attention when the industrial safety film was shown.
Every so often a fight would break out at the bar between two lugs and the bartender would bring out his sawn-off baseball bat to restore order. He’d slam it on the bar a few times then brandish it above his head. Silence. Then there’d be a final shouted curse from one of the combatants followed by a sudden flood of tears and a flight to the men’s room. Eventually, it hit us. These were lovers’ spats. We were in the butchest gay bar in the world. And, I am talkin’ butch. These guys looked like the wrestling tag-team of Skull Murphy and Brute Bernard.
And, when they cried they were really scary!
The Chelsea Bar is long gone along with all those toothless, tattooed, hard-drinkin’, hard-lovin’ men. Were they buried at sea? In Potter’s Field? Did they spend their last days in the “Home for Sissy Stevedores?” Or, did these old salts care for each other in their dotage? Care for each other through the nightmare of AIDS that was gaining on them and perhaps already a stowaway in their bodies?
I dated a Black usher in the supermarket-basement theater. Or, she dated me. I’d never chased Black women. Tell the truth, they’d always been well-nigh invisible to me. Even as a small child, my only thought was that they all had very skinny legs and big feet. I never even looked up into their faces. I had crossed swords with a few militant Black chicks in college but they’d made little impression. Black girls just weren’t on my radar. I think Sandra sensed this, sensed that I wasn’t a phony White liberal pretending to be color-blind while actually obsessed with adding a Black notch to his bedstead. Hell, I didn’t even own a bed.
Angela Davis – every White man’s wet dream but mine.
It was undeniable that with our matching Afros, Sandra and I made a cute counter-culture couple. She enjoyed showing off her hippie boyfriend to her Black girlfriends and I enjoyed the envious stares I caught from White dudes who assumed I must be one whole heckuva lotta man to have an Angela Davis look-a-like on my arm. I tried not to notice the hate-filled stares I got from Black dudes.
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
While performing in Hamlet in New York, I stopped into Macy’s and saw a display for a new board game – The Game of Shakespeare.The demonstrator was a charming elderly actor with white beard and ascot – Commander Whitehead’s doppelgänger. We chatted about the Bard and the Biz. He had performed on Broadway decades before with Louis Calhern, Maurice Evans, Eva LeGallienne and Judith Anderson – top Shakespeareans all. I was careful not to allude to the disparity in our current positions but he was clearly devastated by that bitter reality. I wondered if he would survive the weekend.
“Please, God,” I prayed “shoot me before I become him.”
I worked in a mailroom with an actor who had been a stand-in for many of the close-harmony groups of the 1950s – The Four Freshmen, The Four Lads, The Four Aces, The Four Preps, The Four This, The Four That. People didn’t know what those singers looked like so it was easy to slip in a sub. His closet had been stuffed with plaid sports coats and college letter-sweaters. He had also been a busy jingle-singer on the radio. In the 1940s and ’50s, radio programs would broadcast live from New York then wait three hours for the time change and perform again for the West Coast. During those three-hour breaks, bored singers drank. He was bored. He drank away his wife, his voice, his career. He was twice my age and, like me, working for the minimum wage.
“Please, God,” I prayed, “shoot me before I become him.”
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 8th 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
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.
Don and I were political junkies – he far Left, me far Right. He loved sparring with me and I loved being told that I was the only 19-year-old he’d ever met who could quote Calvin Coolidge. Since Don had worked as a newsman in Washington and New York, he was full of “what really happened” stories of major historical events. And, since he was gay, he gave me the lowdown on which celebrities and politicians of yesteryear had been on the downlow. He also clued me to the fact that homosexuality was endemic in the worlds of espionage and intelligence.
Calvin Coolidge – the greatest American President you never heard of
Don was the annoying type who did The New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. No mistakes. He was a whizz at all word games. No surprise that during World War Two, he worked in the cryptography unit of the US Army. But, he didn’t spend much time code breaking. Turns out, Don could do a brilliant imitation of President Roosevelt that Army intelligence exploited.
FDR or Don? You decide.
India was on the fence in World War Two because it wanted independence from the British Empire. It’s a little-known fact that a sizable Indian army fought for the Axis against Britain. But, the Indian people loved FDR. So, every day, Don read Allied propaganda to India over the radio doing his best impersonation of FDR. He never said that he was FDR but he sure sounded like him. The hope was that giving the Indians a daily dose of FDR’s smarmy, fireside-chat charm could turn the tide in the Allies’ favor. Even Don didn’t know if or how much this trick worked.
Boy Outa Brooklyn 