Jack Henry Abbott – another maggot like Winston Moseley
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?
Richard Adan – Actor Words fail.
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.
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?
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.
38
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
I’ve mentioned Guardian Angels several times so, for you latecomers, I better explain who they are. I have to remind myself that not every boy had hanging over his bed a painting of a Guardian Angel escorting a little boy through a dark wood while the horned, hoofed Devil lurked behind a tree. Not every boy prayed at bedtime –
Angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom God’s love commits me here,
Ever this day be at my side, To light and guard, to rule and guide.
Amen
Here’s the straight skinny, straight out of the catechism: Catholics believe that we are all assigned a Guardian Angel at birth. These invisible, winged creatures are not dimple-buttocked cherubs but flaming-sword waving bruisers who have our backs from “Womb to Tomb.” It’s their mission to keep us out of trouble and out of live sexxx shows. But, they don’t always do a good job. I don’t know if mine was sitting next to me watching Babysitters In Bondage with his head in his hands or if he waited outside smoking a cigarette. But, supposedly, where I go, he goes.
Guardian Angel for He-men
Some Catholics find having an angelic shadow comforting. It makes my flesh crawl. Always has. And, what perplexes me no end is why these heavenly bodyguards let so many kids get hit by cars and fall off fire escapes. Why didn’t Carrie’s Guardian Angel tell her not to go into that vestibule? And, if my murdered friend Carrie wasn’t a Catholic maybe her murderer was and why didn’t his Guardian Angel warn her? You expect me to believe that Carrie didn’t pass a single Guardian Angel the night she was slaughtered?
I’ve always enjoyed getting lost in strange towns and since I was broke that was my only entertainment in Milwaukee – a strange town indeed. On Saturday nights, I watched German and Polish farm-boys, come to the big city for an evening of beer drinking and beer vomiting, challenge each other to daredevil leaps across the opening drawbridges that spanned the Milwaukee River. Sometimes they made it.
Milwaukee hippiedom amounted to one music store that sold records, bongs and crucially, pot to put in those bongs. It was there I met a speed-freak wraith named Tulip. This sixteen-year-old ruin was another sign to me that all was not well in the post-Woodstock days of 1969. We’d just had Manson. Altamont lay dead ahead. The party was if not over, definitely winding down and the casualties were piling up.
Tulip was half this chick’s weight – if that.
Earlier that summer, I’d met another faded flower child. She had allowed a motorcycle gang to pull out all her teeth with pliers. She was tripping on acid at the time of the extraction and was sure her sacrifice would win her the bikers’ undying approbation. No wonder I felt a millennial chill.
Tulip asked me for spare change when she’d been kicked out of the record store for loitering with sonic-erotic intent. She was one of several speed freaks I’d observed attach themselves to the front of the mountainous Marshall amplifier used to play records at ear-bleed volume. They glued their emaciated bodies to the amp’s front like an octopus to a rock. There they clung thrusting their pathetically thin pelvises into the vibrating sound cone as they and the guitar solo reached climax. And, there they remained until the store clerk peeled them off or the music ended and they slid to the floor in post-coital bliss.
Like most boys, certainly Brooklyn stoop-boys, I had an early fascination with excrement. I especially loved poo jokes – most boys do. It’s not pathological and it passes. (See, I’m an adult now and didn’t draw your attention to that cheap pun.) But, there are male children, mercifully few in number, who display early signs of an unhealthy fixation with the natural, nay, essential bodily function of evacuation. As example, allow me to present –
The Case of the Catholic Coprophile
The Adventures of Zorro is the big TV hit of 1957-59. Zorro is the Robin Hood of Old California. Our hero uses his glistening rapier to carve his calling card – a large Z– into the bark of trees, the walls of haciendas and the bellies of his enemies. Every Brooklyn kid wants a Zorro mask, cape and sword. Spoiled kids have all three. The rest of us improvise or beat up the spoiled kids for their Zorro booty.
One boy in St. John the Pederast Primary School is painting large Zs all over the school walls – with his excrement. (It must be a boy because girls and nuns would not do this.) When I say all over, I mean, all over. The young defacer is a genius of product placement. You cannot miss his mark. “Mr. Maximum Visibility.” On some walls, he writes a simple Z; on other walls ZORRO. But, time and quantity of material permitting, he writes Zorro Was Here adding a large, insouciant Z under that for good measure.
But, why? When? How? We students are almost never allowed out of our classrooms alone. Could the demented graffiti artist be our hunchback janitor who looks like Quasimodo and wears an immense, Johnny-Ray-style hearing aid? (Several years later, he is caught spying on little girls in the toilet – echoes of Quasimodo and Esmeralda.) Is he a secret coprophile using the Zorro brand as clever cover for his twisted desire to take revenge on the world by smearing his hunchback dung on school walls? Does he derive still more perverse pleasure from having to remove his own caked-on filth?
1988. West Palm Beach, Florida – a hateful shithole where the theater has imprisoned me and the rest of the cast in a retirement home hi-rise that overlooks the Greyhound Bus station. We are in sub-tropical Florida but our rooms have no air-conditioning. So, to avoid heat prostration, we are forced to keep our windows open and eat bus-exhaust 24/7. Meanwhile, our fellow residents sit staring into space while drooling prune juice down their T-shirts that proclaim “Sexy Grandma” and “Over What Hill?”
Minus the prune juice stains
West Palm. Did I mention it’s a hateful shithole populated by hateful rednecks, hateful New York Jews and hateful Haitian junkies? Did I mention the hateful Haitian junkies have AIDS? I’m warned before embarking on a drive across the Everglades not to stop in Belle Glade – the Haitian capital of Florida and the AIDS and felony capital of America.
West Palm Beach is, not to put too fine a point on it, a hateful shithole. And, a hateful shithole drowning in a drug-fueled crime wave. Make that crime tsunami. Muggings and burglaries do abound. So, to protect its vulnerable residents, the retirement home hi-rise hires Rottweiler’s to patrol its halls after 10 PM. One Rottweiler per floor.
In the 1980s, after a young actress accused her acting teacher of raping her, the dam burst. Former students from as far back as the 1950s reported similar attacks by Professor Pervowitz. He had been an acclaimed teacher and a predatory sadist for decades. He had run weekly ads in The Village Voice. Taught major stars. And, you had to hand it to Pervowitz, he had a psychologically brilliant M.O. He would tell the actor or actress in his sights that they were a genius. But, to prevent jealousy, their “genius” had to remain secret from the other students. Pervowitz was willing to give the budding genius private coaching… ssshhh… to open you up… ssshhh… you are a genius but you are emotionally blocked. I know how to unblock you… ssshhh… now take your clothes off, kneel at my feet and masturbate while repeating – I am your bitch-slut-cunt.”
And, they did it. Many geniuses did it. Male and female did it they – for decades.
Boy Outa Brooklyn 