Memoir – Page 6 – Boy Outa Brooklyn

Kill or Be Killed

Rocky Colavito model Louisville Slugger — **My weapon of choice**

My girlfriend, Lynda, wanted to kill her rapist and wanted me to help her. And, I was more than happy to oblige. We discussed alibis, escape routes, safe houses. But, we didn’t kill him. The more we plotted, the more we realized that we’d be immediate suspects. Lynda had reported her rape to the cops. They were sympathetic but warned that in court it would be a “He said, she said.” Plus, she had established a motive for vigilante justice. And, just as cops always look for the boyfriend first when a woman is murdered, they look for the boyfriend-accomplice first when a rapist has his brains pulped with a Louisville Slugger. We had settled on that as the murder weapon. I no longer had my trusty Rocky Colavito model but Lynda’s little brother had a Reggie Jackson model that would work a treat. She would distract her rapist and I would crush his skull from behind.

Funny what time did to our relationship – a few years later, I plotted to kill Lynda and she plotted to kill me. Her accomplices were two comrades from her Communist Party cell – the woman a failed modern dancer and the man a failed modern poet. A deadly duo.

Poster of Chairman Mao and the Red Guard — **It was Me vs. Mao**

God only knows why but Lynda’s brand of Marxism attracted especially fervent, intelligent, young Whites who were hypnotized by the ravings of their glorious leader – a Hebrew weasel out of the Russian Pale by way of the Brooklyn Pale. He was an imitation Mao and these American kids were his very own Red Guard. I met a talented musician who’d abandoned his French horn scholarship to work in a factory and organize the oppressed workers. I met a beautiful dancer who’d married a Neanderthal negro-convict to convert him to dialectical materialism. I watched her wrestle with reality as she employed the theory of commodification to explain why Tyrone, while on parole, had beaten her bloody, stolen her TV and split.

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
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Actress Slain

Carrie’s body was found at 5:30 AM by a milkman. Imagine. Brooklyn still had milkmen in 1973. A tenant reported hearing something at about the time of Carrie’s murder. It wasn’t a scream or a scuffle, just a “something.” There were reports of suspicious cars seen in the area but the cops checked and dismissed that angle. Remember Carrie’s street was a Dead-End so a getaway car was unlikely. No. Carrie had been followed from the subway. The cops were sure. They questioned people who’d been on her train, “See anything strange?”

No. No one had. The murderer had probably been lurking near the subway station in Brooklyn Heights. A crime of opportunity. Of impulse.

Committed in a minute.

Carried out in a frenzy.

Actress Slain

That was the headline.

Tell me I’m dreaming. This is a movie, right?

The Daily News and New York Post ran the story big. For a few days. Carrie’s smiley 8×10 photo filled their front pages. For a few days. A pretty someone I knew was a tabloid headline. A pretty someone whose death I foresaw. A pretty someone from Indiana. Slain. The streets of New York became a B-movie nightmare-montage in which I saw Carrie’s face everywhere. She smiled at me from every newsstand I passed and from every TV screen in every bar. I found her smile abandoned on subway seats. Discarded in trashcans. Thrown in the gutter.

Mayor John Lindsay of New York — **Mayor John Lindsay _ he made David Dinkins look competent.**

Mayor Lindsay took a big interest in the case. For a few days. Crime and New York had become synonymous under his libtard administration. He appointed extra cops to the hunt and invited Carrie’s parents to stay in the Mayor’s mansion. I could give him the benefit of a doubt but I won’t. He felt guilty and obligated.

“Dear God,” Handsome John Lindsay whined to his campaign manager “not another Kitty Genovese, not on my watch, not in ‘Fun City’.”

Then the faces of other murdered girls pushed Carrie’s smile from the front pages and from memory.

Hell in Hell’s Kitchen

Vintage movie poster for Hell's Kitchen — **The scene of the crime**

I told the cop who was interrogating me that a few days after seeing Carrie walk through Needle Park in a trance, I learned that she and her roommate’s possessions had been stolen. They had packed their car for the move from tenement, roach-infested Hell’s Kitchen to toney, roach-infested Brooklyn Heights. But, they’d committed a cardinal sin. They had loaded their car full of their stuff. I imagined a portable TV with a mouse-ear aerial wrapped in aluminum foil sitting on the back seat next to a hair dryer with the cord wound around it. I saw a bag of hair curlers. I saw Earth Shoes, sandals, magazines. I saw hangers. Everything they owned safely stowed and ready for transit, the girls laughed up the stoop, through the vestibule and up the five tenement flights to check they’d left nothing behind.

Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River in Breakfast at Tiffany's — **Young actresses come to New York still see themselves this way**

I’ll bet they felt like they were in one of those “kooky girls come to New York” movies – My Sister Eileen or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But, when they came back downstairs, their car was empty, the trunk wide-open like the maw of a hippopotamus. When I learned of this theft a dizzying dread crept up my spine. Did my hair stand on end? It may have. I know that I felt helpless against some deadly force, some irresistible undertow, some relentless riptide pulling Carrie under.

Actor Slain

Jack Henry Abbott – a man who had murdered many times said that the last thing his victims said to him before they died was – “Please.” He and a young actor named Richard Adan had a lethal misunderstanding outside an East Village restaurant. Abbott was on trial for sticking a knife into the young actor’s heart. He testified, “I had the knife on his chest and he said, ‘Please’ – that’s what they all say.” When I read that, I flashed on Carrie pleading for her life and I wanted to kill Abbott. But, I didn’t. Still, a guy can dream can’t he?

Oh, almost forgot, the jackass, do-gooder Norman Mailer managed to get Abbott out on bail so he would be free to murder Richard Adan.

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.

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.