New York City memorabilia – Page 9

Donut Porn

Dripping glazed donut — **I know what you’re thinking and you’re going to hell.**

On my way to meet Shmuel, I decide to cast my fate to the winds and become a total voluptuary. I will splurge my last dollar on a donut and coffee in a pigsty way East on 14^th Street. I’ve always hated 14^th Street and Columbus Circle and that pedestrian-tunnel that runs under 42nd Street and Shepherd’s Bush in London and all of Los Angeles. Certain places give me nausea and make me break out in intense psychic hives. 14^th Street is the worst of the worst. But, I’m there and I’m hungry so I plunk down my buck, pour flyspecked sugar into my plastic cup and dunk my stale donut into the greasy brown fluid that passes for coffee. This is when the young woman sitting next to me asks if I’d like to fuck her on film. I’m tellin’ ya, in ’70s Manhattan, an actor on his uppers can’t even enjoy a cup o’ Joe with a sinker without being offered porn stardom.

The gal in question is kinda chubby but kinda cute with an impressive full head of brunette ringlets. She speaks in a heavily slurred Greek accent – heavily slurred because she is heavily stoned and falling off her stool.

Original movie poster for Deep Throat — **The birth of “porn chic”**

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio
Image:the smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn — Available as a paperback and eBook
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here
https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

Hookers in Heat

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

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

The Roach Motel

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

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

Psychedelic Slum

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

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

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

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

Don’t try this at home!

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

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

The Russians Are Coming!

An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavski — **The Bible of bad acting.**

Acting has always attracted the delightful but also the dim, the desperate and the deranged. ‘Twas ever thus. My parents were delightful, stage-struck, Italian kids from Brooklyn when they met in a Manhattan acting school in the 1930s. It was a time when the New York theater was crawling with Russian émigrés all of whom claimed to have been former members of Constantine Stanislavski’s renowned Moscow Art Theater. Stanislavski invented “Method Acting” and every one of the Russo-invaders claimed to have been his mentor – “And, I told Constantine he vas wrong about the emotive mimetic.” Manhattan sheltered more of these borscht bullshitters than the number of baby-boom bullshitters who claim to have seen Jimi at Woodstock.

And, every Boris and Svetlana ran an École de Théâtre in a drafty loft on Delancey Street or a Temple of the Dramatic Arts ensconced in a dank basement on Bleecker. One teacher would dampen the wooden floor of her studio with a garden hose then turn up the heat, thereby creating a steam-room. Her students disrobed and lay down on the floor to do esoteric Siberian breathing exercises. “It is imperative to open and breathe through all the orifices of the body at once.”

Racy stuff for then and total bullshit for always.

Russian actress and method acting teacher, Maria Ouspenskaya. — **Open your bodily orifices, or else!**

Boy Out 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

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.**

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**

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.