Okay. Ready? Here’s the final installment in this mirth-killing series about Yuletide disasters.
When we last saw our hero, (That would be me.) he was slinking home to Brooklyn after debasing himself in a Times Square porn movie house on Christmas Eve! I have entitled this cautionary tale –
Christmas In Queens
Yes, people actually choose to live here.
Remember how mean old Scrooge wakes on Christmas morn a man transformed? Remember how nasty old Ebenezer dances a merrie jig and sends a boy to buy a turkey? Not on this Christmas morn. Not in Brooklyn. I awake to the single worst toothache since Cicero’s oration against Catiline. It drives a spike into my head with every beat of my heart.
Ever try to find a dentist on Christmas Day? Don’t bother. Even Jewish dentists don’t work on Christmas. They want Christians who have been dumped by their bitch girlfriends on Christmas Eve to suffer. Bastards. Desperate for pain-relief, I swallow every pill I find in the medicine cabinet, including the unlabeled ones.
Is this my cat’s de-worming pill? Aw, fuck it.
Then, it hits me.
Oh, Christ, I gotta go sing for Ralphie’s fuckin’ mother in fuckin’ Queens!
My friend Ralphie will pay me one hundred dollars in cash to go to his mother’s house on Christmas afternoon and sing her a surprise Christmas song. I would rather have South American fire ants shoved up my ass but I need that money. God, do I need that money! So, heartache or not, toothache or not, I have to haul my sorry ass out to the sorry-ass end of Queens. No one goes to Queens. Ever. Why would they? I’m not even sure it’s open on Christmas.
Then my damn actor’s integrity kicks in and I determine to give this old gal a rousing “plum pudding” carol sing. It’s not her fault that “Lana the Cunt” dumped me or that Jewish dentists are getting revenge on me for centuries of the Blood Libel. So, I practice my song with a tape-recorder and even pack my pitch pipe. I put on my best “Dickensian” garb – a stovepipe hat stolen from a Victorian play and a scarf wrapped around my neck just as I’d seen carolers do in every production of A Christmas Carol. Then, with my tooth throbbing to an excruciatingly painful Tito Puente beat, I head for Queens – wherever the fuck that is.
Actual photo taken in Queens, NY in 1981. Honest.
It is cold. It is very cold. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you, it is very, very, cold. The subway is running slowly. Very, very, very slowly. I just miss a train and wait on the unheated platform for one hour. (Throbbing tooth.) I just miss a bus and wait on the unheated street for another hour. (Throbbing tooth.) It begins to snow. It is getting dark. (Throbbing tooth.) It takes me four hours to reach my destination.
Why does Queens exist?
My frostbitten fingers ring the doorbell and a sweet old woman answers.
“Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas! I have a special song for you from Ralphie!” I tweet through chattering, throbbing teeth. My scarf is now wound around my head Victorian-toothache-style. Mom lets me step into the vestibule where I whip out my pitch pipe and sing I’ll Be Home or Christmas. But, why haven’t I seen this coming? I am teleported back to the California 7-11. By the miracle of bi-location, I am sobbing next to the Taco melted-cheese dispenser in Oxnard while sobbing in a vestibule in the ass-end of Queens before an embarrassed, confused and frightened old woman. I get through the song and wipe my nose while mentally evaluating my vibrato. (Once an actor…) Mom invites me in for cake and coffee.
“Oh, no, thank you. I have several other stops to make. I don’t want to be late and disappoint anyone. Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!”
The return journey is colder, snowier, slower. It takes me five hours to get back home. I eat a can of tuna fish for Christmas dinner, carefully avoiding my throbbing tooth. That’s all the food in the house. A can of tuna. I then bounce off the walls until dawn with toothache and heartache my only companions.
___________________________
To my long suffering readers –
I wish you a very Merry Christmas and an even better New Year!
_________________________
Available as a paperback and eBook here and here and as an eBook here
Thanks for visiting my blog. It is a sampler of my murder-memoir Boy Outa Brooklyn. The best way to enjoy it is to start at the first post and read chronologically. I hope you’ll find it both hilarious and horrifying.
I will also be posting about the best books, movies and songs about Brooklyn. And, sharing my practical and off-beat travel tips. If you enjoy my blog, please follow me. Hover your mouse in the lower right corner of the screen and a pop-up box will appear. Enter your email address and you’ll never miss one of my posts. Your address will not be sold or shared and you won’t be pestered with any sales cons.
In case you missed this momentous leap forward for mankind…
“Give me your tired, your poor, your children’s genitals.”
So… an insane man pretending to be a woman and who may have castrated himself in pursuit of his delusional belief that he was born in the wrong body will be safe-guarding America’s health. And, since Richard Levine is a pediatrician, you can bet he will have special interest in the genitals of America’s children.
And.. continuing with his “all-trannies, all the time” agenda, Biden has doubled down on allowing psycho-sexual misfits to serve in the military.
Publicity still from Four Jills in a Jeep?
Nope
Remake of Some Like It Hot?
Guess again.
Outtakes from I Was a Male War Bride?
Nah
The above pair of lunatics are America’s first line of defence against all enemies foreign and domestic. And, I don’t mean fly-away hair and nylon runs.
“Terrorist attack? Oh, fudge, I just did my nails!”
But, surely, you say, our allies haven’t succumbed to this faux-female and female-at-any-price madness. Au contraire. Meet Maggie De Block, Belgium’s former Minister of Health. You read that right – HEALTH.
Our Maggie is a real woman – as far as I know and care to find out. But Minister of Health? The fuckoutahere. Minister of Godiva chocolate maybe. But wait, Ms. De Block has eaten her way to a bigger and better job. She is now a W.H.O. Commissioner of HEALTH.
Meanwhile back in the way-out world of America’s 46th president aka the most powerful man in the world…
Biden’s defenders insist that he isn’t senile. Okay. That means he knowingly appointed ten Zionist Jews to the top ten posts in his cabinet.
Zionist Jews are usually dual-citizens of Israel.
Dual citizen = Dual loyalty.
Dual citizens of the U.S. and Israel are notoriously prone to control by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
That means President Joe Biden knowingly put the United States of America into the hands of agents of a foreign power.
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 my latest hard-boiled homage to the tough-guy reporters of yesteryear – Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon.
Get this straight – George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest. Get over it . . . The ugliest thing on two legs is any dame with tattoos on those legs . . . Take this to the bank – Roosevelt and Churchill knew Pearl Harbor was coming and let it happen. Brave souls dared to say it was a set-up as the ships were still smouldering . . . One foreign spy even sent the US military his secret photos of the Japs’ table top model of their attack. Those pix were deliberately buried . . .
Read it and weep.
FDR was such an invalid that his doctors let him work only four hours a day . . . His own party wanted to dump him . . . The slimy Roosevelt clung on to power and spent most of his presidency convalescing on boat and train trips that were disguised as government business . . . Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina was the real president . . .
The president you never heard of, uh… the one on the right.
A rare photo of FDR’s leg braces.
The memoirs and diaries of reporters and diplomats reveal how shocked they were when they first met FDR and saw how sick and weak he was . . . The press protected FDR as it later protected JFK – another very sick man who was presented to America as an athlete full of vigor . . .
Ironically, the back-brace JFK wore kept his back straight but also kept him upright in the limo and open to the fatal head shot.
Had JFK survived his assassination in Dallas, his underlying health problems would have killed him during his second term . . . JFK was a notorious “Wham, bam, thank ya mam” Romeo. The amphetemine shots he got from a notorious “Dr. Feelgood” made him super horny and super fast . . .
Angie Dickinson fucked JFK and quipped, “It was the most exciting ninety seconds of my life.”
Speaking of speed – Fast One by Paul Cain is one of the all-time great hard-boiled crime novels . . . It was written in 1932 but makes tough-guy tomes written decades later read like sissy-stuff . . .
Cain also wrote the screenplay for the underrated Karloff-Lugosi horror film The Black Cat
Karloff’s character in The Black Cat was based on the English Satanist Aleister Crowley.
Take this to the bank – Prohibition worked. It vastly reduced alcoholism and deaths from drunk driving . . . The movies and documentaries you’ve seen mocking Prohibition were made by people who had skin in the liquor racket . . . Algonquin Roundtable wits Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley shared a subscription to a funeral industry magazine . . .
The morbid duo washed with the same soap that morticians use on corpses
As long as we’re on the subject of soap – the holocaust mongers no longer claim the Germans turned Jews into soap. They’ve dropped that hooey about Jews being made into lampshades, too . . . It was a braver man than I who ate the first oyster . . .
Many African-American millionaires made their fortunes selling skin lightener and hair straightener.
Yeah but they don’t tell you how the bitch made her millions.
Blacks, Asians and Orientals still punish their bodies in a hopeless attempt to look White. Don’t believe me? Check out the ads in the back of their magazines . . . Your reporter thinks they should stop this mutilation . . . Attila the Hun was very short but Napoleon was of average height . . . Sigmund Freud was a complete and conscious fraud . . . Siggie was also a dreadful GP and a lethal surgeon . . . He dredged his toxic theories up out of his personal sexual sewer and simply stole and invented the rest . . . Freud, who was Jewish, wrote to friends that he needed neurotic middle-class Jewish women as patients since they were not really ill and would never get well . . .
What Freud said that was true wasn’t new and what he said that was new wasn’t true.
These days no self-respecting shrink uses Freudianism which is now considered the phrenology of the 20th century . . .
Today’s savvy shrinks look at the family photos of their patients coz all the pain and problems are on full display . . . Sound wacky? Visit the Freud Museum in London and cast your eyes over the Freud family album. It’s bleedin’ obvious that Freud was a sadistic creep . . .
The Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith was another conscious fraud. But he came to believe his own hokum and became the most fascinating figure in American religious history
Shortly before his assassination in 1844, Smith spoke as one who knew he was about to die. He gazed into eternity and preached profound and terrifying truths about the nature of God and man . . .
George Fox who founded the Quakers in the 1600s taught that there were men on the moon.
Joseph Smith who founded Mormonism in the 1830s agreed that there were men on the moon but they looked like Quakers!
Sorry to go against the grain but I’ve never joined the cheerleading for The Great Gatsby . . . Give me Fitzgerald’s essays about the Roaring ’20s. They are masterpieces . . . Even better is Appointment in Samarra written by Fitzgeralds’s close friend John O’Hara . . .
The Great American novel? Maybe.
After Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat to Johnson in 1964 and when the Republican Party was at its lowest point in history, John O’Hara boldly predicted a Republican victory in 1968 . . . This newshound knows that when the mainstream media ridicules someone that someone is worth a second look . . . Take another gander at Silvio Berlusconi. He was the only leader to oppose the removal of Gaddafi and predicted that the fall of Libya would produce a flood of migrants from Africa into Europe . . .
Now, ask yourself – who mocked Silvio and why?
I’ve never made it all the way through Some Like It Hot . . . Say, don’t call me daffy – if Boris Johnson wanted to, he could stop the invasion of rapeugees into England via the Channel in a heartbeat . . . Wes Montgomery was a great jazz guitarist but I’ll take Kenny Burrell . . .
Great guitarist. Great musician. Great teacher. The bum can sing, too!
If it weren’t for White fans both jazz and blues would have died decades ago . . . On the last day of his presidency Bill Clinton (acting against the advice of his aides) pardoned the Jewish criminal Mark Rich and the Jewish terrorist Susan Rosenberg . . .
Call me old fashioned but I’ll take Angie Dickinson over this Hebraic hag any day.
Meanwhile – the more things change the more they remain the same . . .
Legend has it that L. Ron Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology on a bet with other sci-fi writers . . . Sssshhh, it’s an open secret that one of the top sci-fi writers lived for years on his own tropical island where he indulged his taste for young boys . . . The African country of Liberia was founded in 1822 under President James Monroe . . .
That’s why Liberia’s lovely capital is named Monrovia.
Liberia was to be a haven and fresh start for freed American slaves . . . The first thing those freed slaves did when they got back home to Africa was get slaves . . . Meanwhile, on the other side of Africa . . .
Somalis have the lowest IQs on earth aside from Australian aborigines.
Try this on for size – Minnesota has more Somalis than anywhere on earth aside from Somalia.
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? . . .
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.
As Brooklyn boy Lenny Bruce quipped, “Bela was a junkie for ten years, cleaned up and dropped dead.” And, it’s sadly true that Lugosi had become addicted to morphine while undergoing medical treatment. It took him many painful years to kick the habit.
His was a classic case of a film career that started at the top and finished in the sub-basement. Think about it. From Tod Browning’s Dracula to Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. Ouch!
Not the long dead Bela but Ed Wood’s wife’s chiropractor!
And, insult to injury, after a horror movie career spent sucking hind tit to his competitor Boris Karloff, Bela took over from Boris in the Broadway comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. Getting sloppy seconds was bad enough but Bela had to play a character whose facial scarification was based on Karloff as Frankenstein. The biggest laughs in the play were built on that gag. (I wonder if they did a re-write so that the crazed brother Jonathan was said to resemble Lugosi as Dracula. If not… double ouch.)
Boris and Bela did not belong to a mutual admiration society.
When not appearing in a succession of bargain-basement horror films, poor Bela schlepped around the world in Dracula drag appearing in fleapit revivals of the stuffy old play. An actor friend of mine worked with Lugosi in one such production and reported that the company rehearsed the play without Bela who was only contracted to appear for the final dress rehearsal. And, at that, he would do only a quick walk through of his scenes. Count Dracula actually appears in surprisingly few scenes in the stage version. And, Bela sure didn’t need the rehearsal, he’d been doing the same tired moves for decades.
The cast was assembled on stage awaiting Lugosi when the theater’s hydraulic lift suddenly cranked into action and slowly raised the floor of the orchestra pit. There stood Bela in full Dracula splendor. The cast formed a receiving line and Bela walked down it shaking and kissing hands while clicking his heels and repeating “I am Lugosi.” He thoroughly charmed the pants off one and all. But, during the performance, my friend was surprised to see buckets of ice in the wings. And, saddened to see Bela thrust his pin-cushion junkie’s arms into the ice to reduce his pain.
Bela effortlessly stealing Son of Frankenstein
Some critics dismiss Lugosi as a one trick pony but I think that’s unfair. He created an iconic film character that is instantly recognized around the globe and not many actors can say that. He was deliciously evil as the hunchback Ygor in Son of Frankenstein. And, he was terrific in The Black Cat and in the criminally underrated Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. If only he had lived, Bela could have feasted on the movie memorabilia boom of the late 50s and 60s. And, I gotta believe that Roger Corman would have cast Bela in his Edgar Allen Poe movies. He would have been perfect casting and big box office partnered with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr.
Bela having a ball with Lou Costello
But, hey, they can’t all be gems…
Hey! Don’t blame Brooklyn!
In 1952, our hero was forced/enticed into making the “Poverty Row” comedy-horror flick Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Now, I am second to no one in my affection for all things Brooklyn and for movies that feature guys in a gorilla suit but even I have my limits. (It’s on YouTube if you dare.)
Doesn’t look like any of the Brooklyn gorillas I knew.
Bela actually managed to walk through this turkey with style and wit. But, this former Shakespearean actor who had worked with Garbo must have been thinking, “How the fuck did I end up playing second banana to a team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis imitators and a schmuck in a gorilla suit?”
Bela having a ball with Garbo in Ninotchka. What might have been?
Boy Outa Brooklyn 