Old New York – Page 5 – Boy Outa Brooklyn

Elegy For Irish America

Senator Joseph McCarthy — **He was on to the commie-scum then and that’s why they hate him to this day.**

I don’t cry on 9/11. I cry on 9/12. I cry while watching a news report about people who had escaped the Twin Towers before they collapsed. One survivor says that as he walked down fifty flights of stairs with terrified co-workers, he was amazed to see a line of firemen loaded with equipment walking up. Up! Up to who knew what? “I’ll never forget the faces of those young men,” he says. “They all had blue eyes.”

That’s when I cry.

Of course, they all had blue eyes, you dumb fuck. They were New York City firemen. Every real New Yorker knows that New York firemen are Irish. New York cops, too. And, plenty of them died on 9/11. They were Irish kids from the street. Irish kids from the stoop. We went to St. John’s together and served Mass together. We got ascared at horror movies together and played stickball and swapped baseball cards and wrestled on the sidewalk and gave each other fat lips and black eyes. They called me “wop” and I called them “mick.” Their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been cops and firemen. They’d sit on the stoop and shake their Irish heads and tell me that we should have unleashed Patton. They’d take a slug from the beer they clutched in their big Irish mitts and teach me that Joe McCarthy was right. They’d warn me about pinko-commie attack that was headed our way. And, they were right! And, I wept like a sonofabitch for their kind.

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

Murder Suspect

NYPD interrogation room — **I knew they were watching me through the mirror.**

The cops ask anyone who knew Carrie to get in touch. So, I get in touch and they offer to send a squad car to pick me up in Manhattan. But, I tell them, “You don’t have to do that. I’m from Brooklyn. I know how to get there. I’ll save you some time.” This is when I become a suspect. Figures. I know Brooklyn. I knew Carrie. I get to the stationhouse and it is right out of Kojak.

Who chose this vomit-green paint for all municipal buildings in New York?

The cops put me in an interrogation room and leave me there for thirty minutes.

A long, sweaty thirty minutes.
A that’s a two-way mirror and they’re watching me right now, thirty minutes.
A hold-on, I’m-a-suspect, thirty minutes.

Whoa. Wait a minute. Did I kill Carrie? I’ve never killed anyone as far as I know but maybe this is what it’s like to be a killer – you blank the crime out. Missing time. Wait a minute. Where was I last night? Was that dream I had about Carrie’s death a few nights ago the way my homicidal-maniac brain filtered reality? Did I kill Carrie?

Carrie and Bruce

I’ll let you in on another secret; the cops tell me that whoever stabbed Carrie thirty-eight times could have done it in a minute – their arms a blur. Bruce Lee dies on the same day Carrie is murdered. You ever see Bruce in his Kung-Fu prime, his arms a wind-milling blur? Picture Bruce with blades attached to his flying hands punching Carrie thirty-eight times. People who have been knifed say it feels like a punch. You feel the fist of the attacker hitting your body as the blade goes in up to the hilt, not the blade slicing into your flesh.

That’s a big number. That’s more than three-dozen stab wounds. And, it takes the murderer only a minute to do that. He has to be in a frenzy to accomplish the task. You think it’s easy to stab someone thirty-eight times in a minute? Try it. Try stabbing a pillow thirty-eight times that quickly or a watermelon or a piece of meat. See if you can do it without breaking the blade or cutting your fingers off.

Time yourself.

Carrie and Kitty

Kitty Genovese murder victim — **The face that haunts New York**

I ask a man and woman who are exiting the building if they remember the murder of my friend, Carrie. The woman gasps and flees down the street. I flash on the stabbing of Kitty Genovese – the infamous case of apartment dwellers who did nothing to stop a young woman being knifed to death because they “did not want to get involved.”

Kitty was from my Brooklyn neighborhood then moved to Queens. She and Carrie, both slim, pretty, vivacious brunettes were attacked at 3:30 AM as they returned home from parties. Winston Moseley, a Negro necrophile and serial rapist, knifed Kitty on the street. Kitty sought safety in a vestibule but Moseley found and butchered her there. He then raped what he hoped was her dead body. Moseley confessed that he’d gone out that night hunting specifically for a White woman to kill. Kitty was his racial prey.

Kitty Genovese sitting on a stoop — *Girl* Outa Brooklyn sitting on the stoop

The sub-human Moseley had raped many women and killed two others before Kitty. He stabbed a fifteen-year-old to death after breaking into her bedroom. In horrible symmetry, she and Carrie were slaughtered ten years apart – to the very day.

Winston Moseley rapist, necrophile and murderer — **Every woman’s nightmare**

But, as with the piano teacher-maniac who killed two actresses, Moseley escaped the death penalty on a Talmudic technicality only to then escape prison and rape two more women. Even so, liberals fought for decades to get the sadistic, homicidal, Negro necrophile paroled. (I wonder if these do-gooders planned to house him next door to their own daughters and mothers?) The good news is that the maggot Moseley rotted to death behind bars.

The Death of New York

I visit my hometown a year after 9/11 and find it dusty, deflated and more ascared than ever. Paranoia and para-military security guards are everywhere while humor and spunk are nowhere to be found. I search for New York but it is gone. It is gone because New Yorkers are gone. The city has been stolen from the great people who forged it into the greatest metropolis ever known. But, it isn’t planes flying into unloved skyscrapers that displaces those giants who created the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Central Park, the Metropolitan Opera, Yankee Stadium, Coney Island, the Bronx Zoo, Wall Street, Broadway, the Brooklyn Bridge and Green-Wood Cemetery. No. Their city has been stolen from them by a Left-Right political pincer movement like the one that dumped my insane Aunt Rosa into Times Square.

Abandoned factory interior — **New York City families were forged here.**

Here is how that pincer worked – the Left flooded New York with Chinese and Hispanics who became permanent wards of the state and thus Democrat voters while the Right welcomed them as cheap labor. In the 1960s, the factory owners tried to pay their White union-workers coolie and peon wages. The Whites resisted, the factories closed and neighborhoods died. The imported Chinese and Hispanics poured into those formerly union factories that had reopened as sweatshops and they worked there for coolie and peon wages. Simple. Clever. Lethal. Just as predicted to me on the stoop.

Glasgow Comes To Brooklyn

The Hay Wain by John Constable — **It looked swank on a Brooklyn tenement wall, too.**

One day in 1958, I’m looking at the tenement across the street when I see a vision – a creature so out of place, so ethereal, so “other” that I have to go out and speak to it. Its name is Andy and it’s from Glasgow, Scotland. I am eight and have a vague idea of where Scotland is but no idea of what Glasgow is like. I imagine something with lots of cozy cottages. The wallpaper in my childhood bedroom has a reproduction of the painting The Hay Wain by Constable in an endlessly repeating pattern all over it. It forms my image of Britain – a land of endlessly repeated cozy cottages beside winding streams. When I first hear of Greenwich Village, I picture the Manhattan skyline with an English village of cozy cottages nestled inside it. As a teenager, when I hear “Ferry ’Cross the Mersey” I imagine a narrow winding stream that’s lined by cozy cottages. Weeping willows grow aside the cottages, their branches gently brushing the punts as they pass. (My imagined Mersey was as wrong as my imagined Lake Michigan!)

The slum tenements of Glasgow, Scotland — **Worse than Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.**

I now know that Glasgow in the 1950s was every bit as rough as Brooklyn – a pair of blue-collar towns with bits of gentility around the edges. Brooklyn’s brownstones even originated in Glasgow. So, it isn’t that Andy had moved into a completely alien environment. But, the Andy I met in 1958 was not a tough kid. And, acting tough doesn’t make you tough. It’s a cover. What do you think tattoos are all about? I wonder if Andy is haunted by the memory of that day in the cemetery as much as I am. Maybe not. Maybe not. But, I am haunted by him as I am haunted by Carrie.

Baseball Tetrazzini

Vintage baseball glove with baseball — **The pocket could never be *too* deep.**

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.

Some Entertained Angels Unawares

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

Place: Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn

Time: Early morning. November. 1969

Weather: Fareezzing fucking cold.

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

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

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

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

________________________

The Boys in the Band vs. The Village People

Gay men in studs and leather on the street — **Waiting to check in at the “Y”**

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.

Vintage gay pulp cover - A Masculine Scent — **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.

__________________

Hey, Sailor!

**The Mermaid Tavern not to be confused with the Chelsea Bar.**

The cast of Macbeth drank in an 8^th 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.

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?