YANKEE GO HOME

The Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Tennessee – God’s Country!

I HAD BEEN LIVING in London for three decades when a voice in my head began nagging me. “Yankee Go Home,” it said. I believe all ex-pats hear this voice no matter what their home country. It’s natural to want to be home especially as we age. And though I remain eternally grateful to Britain for giving me the use of the hall for so long, I had fallen out of love with the place and the feeling was mutual. 

The London I moved to thirty years earlier had become unrecognizable. Believe it or not, back then, London was shut on Sundays and the idea of a Muslim mayor was laughable. (A Hindu Prime Minister? Impossible.) In fact, I was shocked in 1990 when I saw just one completely veiled Muslim woman on the street! For the first twenty years of my London adventure, crime – especially violent crime – was very low and there was a general orderliness and decency about the place. (At least compared to the New York City I had fled.) I miss London circa 1990 as I miss New York circa 1956. Sadly, both cities are gone forever. 

By 2010, I was looking behind me on the streets and looking at anti-FGM billboards on the tubes. I also had to slalom through a feces-strewn tent city to get into my tube station. Then I had a fist fight with a pickpocket on a London bus (I won) and the police questioned me! Before my eyes, London had morphed into Detroit with a few Ye Olde touristy bits. It was time for this actor to exit and pronto. 

Some readers may remember my earlier post “Fade to Black” which catalogued the deliberate discrimination against White performers. (The best-selling thriller author James Patterson says that White writers now face the same attack.) Well… since the BLM riots and media company capitulation to the Black mobs, that anti-White discrimination has increased exponentially. Anyone who watches film and TV now recognizes how much non-White faces have invaded our screens. So, I was facing a future as an old White actor in London who would be unemployable or offered roles in anti-White garbage that I would never accept. Then Covid hit and I was shocked and disappointed by how easily the Brits surrendered. Other nations did the same but somehow, I expected better of the British. So… in May of 2021 – feeling as though I was escaping East Berlin in the Cold War – I split for points West. 

Davy Crockett

Strange to report, this Brooklyn boy didn’t end up back on the stoops of Brooklyn but rather in the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Tennessee – Davy Crockett country! In 1955, like every other kid in the US, I lived in my Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Now, by some strange twist of fate, I was living a stone’s throw from Davy’s birthplace. And it’s as close to a Goldilocks spot as you could find. The waves of White urbanites fleeing here prove my point. The terrain is beautiful, the climate temperate, the demographics 95% White, and, prior to the Biden economy, it was remarkably affordable. Sadly, in my one year in this demi-paradise the price of gas has doubled with no ceiling in sight and food prices are skyrocketing, too. 

More bad news is that the anti-White bias controls show business here, too. The casting notices for screen, stage, or voice work are all skewed toward non-Whites and people who clearly have more genders than sense. The producers and directors trumpet their preferred pronouns and expect me to do the same. (I don’t.) The Web pages of regional theaters are plastered with Black faces giving the impression that theater is an almost exclusively Negro invention and activity. And these theatres proclaim that their primary mission is not to put on good productions of plays that a paying audience might enjoy seeing, but rather to promote racial equality, social justice, diversity, and inclusion — especially for the LGBTQLMNOP+ community. When I phone the office of the Screen Actors Guild, I am given a list of options to dial if I have experienced racial or sexual abuse. It’s revealing that I am not given a phone option if I, as a worker, feel I have been monetarily abused. The once mighty SAG union has been effectively busted by the Jewish media moguls who claim to be all for social justice.

Tennessee is a solid red (Republican) state, and I am living in the reddest part of that state. This is Trump Country. I landed here only a few months after Biden took office, but the roads were already lined with Trump 2024 signs, and I regularly see hilariously filthy anti-Biden bumper stickers too vulgar to recount. The folk here are very, very pro-police and pro-military. Tennessee is known as the Volunteer State because it has always sent more men per capita to the military than any other. 

Veterans are worshipped here. They get special sales, parking spots, and meal deals. I’m the only guy not wearing a t-shirt declaring “Proud Vietnam War Veteran” or “Proud Korean War Veteran.” Many wear hats that proclaim, “Proud Wounded Veteran” or, even better, “Proud Battle-Wounded Veteran.” The sad truth is that these brave men are knee-jerk super-patriots. They were cannon fodder but can’t admit it. As much as they despise Biden, if he sent them into battle, they would click their heels (even their prosthetic ones) and be off. As far as they are concerned, no American ever fought in an unjust war.

The spoils of war.

I believe this mindset is a legacy of the Civil War. Southern men, with their British blood, love to fight. But they also feel a need to prove they are loyal to the union. I’ve seen this same syndrome in Mormons who also had a long history of bloody opposition to the rest of America. That’s why they disproportionately serve in the FBI and CIA. This “rah-rah the flag” mentality makes discussing American foreign policy a minefield. I have used the Russia-Ukraine war to make some progress, but I first must counter the anti-Russia nonsense they’ve been fed by the media including Fox News.

I thought there were lots of churches in Rome until I moved to Eastern Tennessee. There are churches everywhere here, even in the middle of the forest. Baptist is by far the most common denomination, but there are more versions of Baptist than Heinz has beans. Then there are the other major Protestant groups along with Church of Christ, Church of God, and assorted micro-denominations. Catholics are rarer than rocking-horse shit. In fact, when I tell people I’m an ex-Catholic they look for my horns and hooves. I’m told that in one church very near me they handle snakes. But don’t get the impression I’m living in a hillbilly holler. This region has ballet companies and symphonies. Life is very similar in the Appalachian Mountains up and down the East Coast. Anyone familiar with the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania or the Adirondacks of New York would feel at home here. 

That Old Rugged Cross

Everyone I meet invites me to their church, so I’ve been to quite a few. The services are bland with decent contemporary Gospel singing and generic “Jesus loves you” sermons. The congregants are ancient and busily waiting for The Rapture. They are instinctively against all the right things like globohomo and open borders but are unaware that organized Jewry is pushing these poisons. Most have never even met a Jew in their lives. (The same is true in Mormon Utah.) Most churches are not explicitly Christian Zionist, but they have a Disneyfied picture of the Twelve Tribes. In their artwork, Moses looks like Charlton Heston and the ancient Jews look Bavarian. This makes it difficult to make them see the truth about modern Jews and the criminal state of Israel. After all, “That nice Charlton Heston wouldn’t do anything un-Christian to us.”

The Hebe of their dreams.

The naïveté of these Christians extends to homosexuality. They are vehemently against it but don’t really know how truly degenerate it is. It is beyond their comprehension and simply too distasteful to discuss. As a result, some queers are making headway in the local school system pushing those “Cindy Has Two Mommies” books. I raised the issue with several local politicians. They simply could not comprehend what I was talking about and didn’t want to know. So, ironically, the unspeakable nature of homosexuality is its best defense. 

Love Is Love

Against my better judgement, I attended a 100% White Republican Party luncheon and, as I feared, it was full of back-slapping Chamber of Commerce types and their former beauty queen wives. None of the candidates who addressed us said anything of substance or that couldn’t have been said by a Democrat. Not a peep about race or the Great Replacement Policy. In private conversation, I asked the candidates some tough questions about race, but they brushed them off as not relevant because we’re all God’s children. (Christianity is a big problem for White nationalism!) I later learned that most of these candidates run unopposed, so they have become complacent. 

These politicians and their constituents are in for a shock and a fight. The forces of darkness have crept into these mountains while their backs were turned. There is now an Islamic Cultural Center here.

The regional airport will no doubt soon be forced to accept Biden’s secret nighttime flights filled with non-White invaders. One local church has just imported an Afghani family with their entire village soon to follow, along with their goats. And, as is always the case, the local university is a haven to Jewish professors and pink-haired, morbidly obese creatures of dubious sexuality. I doubt these psycho-sexual misfits can find common cause with the native conservative Christians. I predict conflict in the not-too-distant future. The locals better conjure the fighting spirit of their British pioneer ancestors, or they will go the way of the dodo.

Calling All Celts!

I oppose violence and would never condone or encourage it. But as America faces social collapse and the inevitable chaos it brings; it is comforting to know that there are four million registered deer hunters in Pennsylvania alone. I doubt many of those are non-binary. Tennessee is even more gun-friendly. The media-hyped mass shootings in America just increase gun sales here. (By the way, the US ranks only 64th in the world in mass shootings!) In fact, in this state you don’t even need a license to own a gun and concealed carry licenses are easy to come by. The men I see in Walmart with shirts hanging over their belts are concealing more than their beer guts. That said, this is the most peaceful region I’ve ever lived in. Maybe it’s because so many people are armed. In my one year here, I have not seen one violent incident or even heard a raised voice. 

In some ways, America is little changed in my thirty years away. The shape of daily life is about the same. Ubiquitous phones, social media, and technology are one definite change and one for the worse. But the rise of entitlement culture is the biggest change I’ve seen. The glorification of victimhood and vulnerability. The rampant narcissism. I believe a certain Austrian painter called it, “The tyranny of the unwell.” 

Thanks to voter fraud, the Democrats avoided being wiped out in the recent mid-term elections. But the results proved this is a 50-50 country with no hopes of reconciliation. The left and right need a no-fault divorce. The Whites and non-Whites need racial separation. Barring those rational, compassionate solutions things will get very ugly.

Meanwhile, the race to replace Biden as the Democrat nominee in 2024 will be as heated as that to replace Johnson in 1968. I predict this period will be similarly riot-filled and blood-soaked. All the entitled minority factions will be off the chain. And I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather ride out the storm than smack dab in Davy Crockett country! 

________________________

Available as a paperback and eBook here and here and as an eBook here

Roadmap to Blog Outa Brooklyn

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.

Welcome to my Brooklyn,

Jack Antonio

Available as an eBook here

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STOP THE PRESSES! #3

vintage cartoon of newsboy
Here’s another hard-boiled homage to the two-fisted reporters of yesteryear – Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon.

Waaaiiittt a minute – first they told us to buy expensive masks with breathing valves coz simple masks wouldn’t stop Covid. Now they tell us to not buy masks with valves coz they spread the disease. Who’s in charge here? . . .  

Vintage deep sea diver
Coming soon – the “Anthony Fauci Signature Mask” guaranteed to cure what ails ya!

From its earliest days television was described as “chewing gum for the eyes” and “the idiot box” and “a vast wasteland.” All correct . . . My favorite description of TV is – “an electronic sewer-pipe in the corner of your living room.” Even the genteel NPR in the states and BBC in Britain are pumping genteel sewage into your brain. Turn ’em off . . .

Open sewer pipe
Pass me the remote, will ya? Uh… on second thought…

Hey, if masculinity is so “toxic” why do so many lesbians pretend to be male and dress like traditional grooms . . .

Black lesbian couple at marriage
“Do you take this man, uh, I mean pretend-man… oh, you figure it out.”

And why do they pretend to be super-butch males? Doesn’t that make them super-toxic? . . .

Butch lesbian on motor cycle

Hey, If masculinity is so “toxic” why would any woman want to “transition” to male? Answers on a postcard . . . Another question – If male to female transsexuals are returning their bodies to a “natural” state then why do they have to insert a dildo-like plastic tube into their manufactured vaginas for several hours a day to prevent their bodies from closing up and healing what it detects as an open bleeding wound? . . .

Vaginal dilators
The colors are a nice touch, no?

When bluegrass bands play heavy metal and Motown music, it’s better than the originals . . . Southern, White Christian males are the only group in the world that we are allowed and even encouraged to mock . . . When people wearing Corona-masks flinch away from me, I want to beat them to a bloody pulp . . . In the 1960s, U.S. police departments came under massive Marxist attack over supposed police brutality against Blacks. The anti-Communist John Birch Society ran the counter-campaign: “Support Your Local Police and Keep Them Independent.” It made them a laughing stock . . .

Poster for Support Your Local Police and keep them independent
I wonder how many Americans will laugh when their local police are defunded and replaced with a national Stasi?

Please explain this to me – The US & UK built many massive “Covid emergency centers” to handle the predicted overflow from hospitals. These facilities, boasting many thousands of beds, were unneeded and unused. They’ve been dismantled. But, hold up, from the beginning of the Covid-hoax we were warned of even deadlier second and third waves of the virus. If the powers-that-be actually believed this disaster was coming then why did they dismantle essential facilities mere months before Covid would return with a vengeance? . . . The big band leader Stan Kenton had an incestuous relationship with his daughter that lasted from her pre-teen years to young womanhood . . .

Stan Kenton and his daughter
She’s written a book claiming it wasn’t all bad. Hmmmnnn . . .

Is it me or are more female teachers banging their students these days? . . . British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is such a racial mongrel even he doesn’t know what he is . . . BoJo wants to import 3.5 million Chinese from Hong Kong at a time of unprecedented UK unemployment and economic crisis . . . Maybe our boy is Chinese, too? . . . How do the Chinese pay him off? . . .  

Boris Johnson and Chinese dragon
Take 3.5 million from Column A and 3.5 million from Column B.

The Empire State Building was a flop for decades and was dubbed The Empty State Building . . .  Even before Corona and the riots, I knew that Trumpowitz was gonna lose the election coz the demographics were against him in Florida, Arizona and Georgia. He had the right impulse about Corona i.e. let it burn through and develop herd immunity but then he listened to President Kushner and surrendered to the hysteria. Then he listened again to President Kushner and didn’t crack down on the riots immediately. He’s making a few tough tweets now but it’s too late. He’s gonna have no convention, no rallies and no second term . . .

Jared Kushner and Donald Trump
President Kushner keeping an eye on his puppet.

The spectacularly corrupt and stupid Biden will win but he will be a figurehead and so will his incompetent female Black VP whoever she is . . . America will be ruled by a cabal of Marxists with Obama pulling the strings . . . Bader-Ginsburg will resign with much fanfare and spike the football on her way out. The Marxists will get to appoint at least two other justices. Then they will  abolish the electoral college, open the borders, open the prisons, pass amnesty and bankrupt the country . . . When Trumpstein appeared, I said that he wasn’t important but what he represented and who came after him were. I also said that he would fail but that his failure would be useful. It would set the stage for a genuine White Nationalist leader to emerge. This coming leader who is yet unknown will operate outside of electoral politics. He will be a strongman in the mold of Caesar or Franco . . .

Francisco Franco
Barring his arrival, Whites in America will be lucky to be living in something akin to South Africa. The situation in Europe and the UK is equally bleak.

During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s more Communists were killed by other Communists than by Franco’s forces . . . Stalin saw that war as a chance to finally clean out the Trotskyites . . . The Gospel Quartets and Quintets of the 1940s and 50s were pure rock & roll, doo-wop and soul. Listen to the Swan Silvertones and the Soul Stirrers and you’ll hear it . . .

The Swan Silvertones
Claude Jeter of the Silvertones was The Man!
Kenny Hinson
Meanwhile, White gospel singer Kenny Hinson could have been a massive country music star if he’d wanted to be.  He had one of the great voices in American music!

I’ve never bought any music by The Beatles or Bob Dylan . . . Cardinal Spellman of New York was called the American Pope. He was also a predatory homosexual who cruised gay bars in Gotham accompanied by famous homos of the theater. These lavender lads all favored young Black meat . . . The Cardinal was also a rabid hawk. It’s said he spent more time on his knees in Viet Nam servicing GIs than praying . . .

Francis Cardinal Spellman
Franny Spellman in full drag. Say a prayer for the altar boys!

Tony Blair’s Labour Party promoted 24/7 drinking in pubs and widespread gambling so I guess it really did care about the health and welfare of the White working class; or was it that Blair took money from scumbags who made their fortunes by selling gambling, alcohol and tobacco to the White working class? . . . Hookers will tell you that often their johns just want to talk about their wives and children . . . The Arabic word for African is “slave” . . . Millions more Africans were enslaved by Muslim countries than by the Christian world . . .

African slave castrated by Muslims
Muslims chopped off the penis and testicles of their African slaves.

Saudi Arabia didn’t outlaw slavery until 1962 . . .  Millions more Africans were enslaved by Brazil than by the USA . . .  Brazil didn’t outlaw slavery until decades after the USA did . . . Most of the slave ships and slave markets were owned and run by Jews . . . How come Black Lives Matter isn’t protesting outside Brazilian, Israeli and Islamic embassies? . . . My favorite true-crime cases are Lizzie Borden, Sam Sheppard and Jeffrey MacDonald . . .

Lizzie Borden
Lizzie was guilty as hell. The murder house is now a B & B.
Dr. Sam Sheppard
Dr. Sam was innocent. The poor bastard ended up as a pro-wrestler.
Jeffrey MacDonald
The jury is still out on MacDonald who is rotting in prison. The film maker Errol Morris is convinced MacDonald is innocent. You decide.

The father of singer Harry Connick, Jr. was a New Orleans D.A. accused of covering up the JFK assassination . . . The father of actor Woody Harrelson was a Texas hitman who many believe was one of the mysterious “Three Tramps” arrested behind the Grassy Knoll on the day JFK was hit . . .

The "Three Tramps" on the Grassy Knoll
“Daddy, is that you?”

Abraham Lincoln opposed expanding slavery into the West not because he was opposed to slavery but because he was opposed to spreading Blacks further into America . . .  

Cartoon of Abe Lincoln with a slave
Not so honest Abe didn’t free the slaves in the North.

Lincoln’s last meeting in The White House was with Black leaders to decide how and where to repatriate or resettle the freed slaves – Africa, South America and part of Texas were considered . . .

John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln
If only John Wilkes Booth had missed!
Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio
Available as an ebook here and as an eBook and paperback from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk

BROOKLYN BOOKS #5

I love reading good books – especially good books set in New York. I’m guessing you do to or you wouldn’t be here. And, I’m guessing that, like me, you love discovering book stores built over basements bursting with used books and then hunting and coughing your way through the dusty stacks.

I even have a recurring dream of descending into an imagined basement in a Manhattan slum and finding the used book store of my dreams. (Literally of my dreams.) For years, I’ve been returning to this seemingly limitless catacomb.   

The great joy of being a book hunter is stumbling over a new author, subject or world. Here are some of my most treasured discoveries – 

Psychic Dictatorship in America 

by Gerald B. Bryan (1940)

Guy and Edna Ballard – the Bonnie & Clyde of the Occult
  • An insider’s exposé of The Mighty I Am. This spiritualist cult was popular in the 1930s and is still around. The money-mad Ballards gave birth to many imitators and set the template for the entire New Age movement complete with fairies, fruitcakes and frauds. On orders from the Ascended Masters, adherents murdered their pets. No foolin’.

Instantaneous Personal Magnetism 

by Edmund Shaftesbury (1933) 

“Look into my eyes, stop fidgeting and remove your wet clothes… ”
  • Tips published by the International Magnetism Club based in Manchester, England. Chock full of lifesaving information on nerve tensing, magnetic foods, wet clothes, thin shoes and fidgets. Hey, these guys were from Manchester and that’s good enough for me. Betcha they were Masons, too.

Adventures with Vending Machines

by Ray Burkett (1967)

Vending sun tans in the 1940s.
And, people doubt that man landed on the moon.
  • The “straight skinny” from one-who-knows on how to make millions stocking gumball machines in garages and paperback book racks in drug stores. With special chapters on, condom vending machines, pay toilets, the salted-in-the-shell peanut racket and the ever-fraught subject of vending in negro locations.  

Analism Among the Poor 

by Preston Harriman (1970)

Part of Harriman’s multi-volume indictment of class struggle and lube.
  • Harriman’s oeuvre includes: Analism Among the Poor, Analism Among the Rich, Anal Girl, From Adultery to Analism and Oral Aunts. (Preston was either hungry for a change of pace, or had a very friendly aunt.) Sadly, I’ve found only the one work by Harriman but I live in hope. Still, I’m not sure I’d shake his hand at a book signing.
And you thought I was kidding!

But what does all this have to do with Joe the Engineer, I hear you cry. This –

You know how it is – your moving down the used book aisle, head tilted sideways, giving yourself scoliosis, scanning the book spines when a title catches your interest. You never heard of the author. The cover and blurbs intrigue you. You read the first sentence and next thing you know the clerk is telling you the store is closing. You blow the mildew from your lungs, brush the cobwebs from your clothes and head up to the cashier clutching gold-in-print. 

That’s how I found Joe the Engineer by Chuck Wachtel (1983). I stumbled over it in the used book basement of the original Sam Weller’s in Salt Lake City. I found Francine Prose, David Markson, Charles Portis, Sam Lypsyte and Tom Perrotta in similar basements around the world. (They haven’t written any “Brooklyn” books so I’m not featuring them on this blog. But, if you are a fan of dazzling prose, do yourself a favor and read them. Trust me. Just do it.) 

Anyone who has read my memoir Boy Outa Brooklyn will know that my opinion of the neighboring Borough of Queens is not high. Since Wachtel’s book is set in that hellhole, it’s not a “Brooklyn” book. But, since I grew up surrounded by “Joe the Engineers” and might have been one myself, and since it validates everything I’ve written about Queens and since it is so damn good and since this is my blog and I can do whatever I wanna do – I’m gonna do you a favor by making it my Brooklyn Book # 5. (So there.)

Joe the Engineer is quite simply one of the truest and most moving novels of working-class life ever written. I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

Chuck the Wachtel

Joe is a Vietnam vet stuck in a dead-end job reading meters in Queens basements and living in Richmond Hill – the same dead-end Queens neighborhood where he grew up.

Joe’s Richmond Hill, Queens is the evil twin my South Brooklyn.

Joe is saddled with half-assed intelligence and half-assed dreams. And, Wachtel does a masterful job of capturing the mind of a person who isn’t fully conscious of the “how and why” of his miserable state but senses that something is wrong somewhere. The working class is full of such “canaries in a coal mine.” The media loves to mock them when they are inarticulate in their rage and confusion but I’ve always heard them loud and clear.  

I’ve heard them because I am one of them. My antenna has always been finely attuned to pick up snide condescension from the elites. (That’s what cost Hillary Clinton the election. White workers ain’t dumb ya know.) So, I appreciated how “working-class Wachtel” applied his writer’s eye to our shared caste without snobbery or sentimentality. 

I especially enjoyed listening to Joe’s thoughts as he read his customer’s lives while reading their basement meters. I saw him as a blue-collar Howard Carter mining the minutiae of ancient Egyptian life from hieroglyphs though in Joe’s case it is from ancient wall calendars and broken toys.

In one exquisitely painful passage, the unhappily married Joe has a disastrous one-night-stand with a supermarket checkout girl.
 

I found a 1983 radio interview with Wachtel – the year Joe was published. I was pleased but not surprised to learn that one of Chuck’s literary models was Hubert Selby Jr. whose Last Exit to Brooklyn is one of my Brooklyn Books. I was less pleased and surprised that Wachtel sounded prissy and academic. And when he blithely stated that America was a “mulatto” nation, my antenna started twitching. “Mulatto” is code for White genocide. It’s shorthand for “Death to Joe the Engineer.”

Happily, in 2020, “mulatto” is still not the norm in America and race-mixing is frowned upon by the vast majority of all races. (Don’t believe me? Listen to minority talk radio.) And, it was certainly not the rule fifty years ago despite Wachtel’s best wishes. However, due to the subversive work of those condescending elites (whom Wachtel chastised) and their fellow-travellers like, ironically, Chuck Wachtel himself, the Joe the Engineers of Richmond Hill and the world are being replaced. 

Joe’s parents circa 1950
The couple who bought Joe’s parent’s house.
Ya think they have racial consciousness?

Yes, the solidly White working-class Richmond Hill, Queens to which Joe returned after being used as cannon fodder in Viet Nam is now not open to his kind. For Richmond Hill, Queens is now known as Little India-Guyana-Trinidad and Tobago.     

Richmond Hill circa 2050.
Who needs water meters when there’s no water?

I eagerly sought out and read Wachtel’s other works which include poetry but, for me, Chuck is a one-hit-wonder. Still, as with those other liberal half-wits I’ve reviewed, Alfred Kazin and Pete Hamill, I’m gonna cut Chuck Wachtel some slack coz he wrote a beauty.  Do yourself a favor – read it!

There seems to be a movie in the works but I fear they’ll kill the book with politically correct crap. Betcha the supermarket check out girl is Black or Muslim. And, probably cast with Chuck’s approval. Never mind –  “I hereby pronounce Joe the Engineer an honorary Brooklyn Boy.”

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio
Available as an eBook here
and as a paperback and eBook from
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk

My Road to Damascus

Brooklyn College
Harvard, eat ya heart out!

It happened on a bright June day in 1967. I was walking across the surprisingly bucolic campus of Brooklyn College nestled inside the decidedly un-bucolic Flatbush. Many of the campus buildings were ivy-covered brick so who needed the Ivy League? I was a recent Catholic high school graduate there for a day of testing and orientation. I was unaware that I was in the epicenter of Jewish communist activism. 

Brooklyn College was so radical it was called “the little red school house” but not to be confused with The Little Red School House in Greenwich Village. Both institutions graduated a spectacularly disproportionate number of Levantines who were moaning-Marxists of dubious sexuality and (worst of all) folk singers. 

The co-eds at Brooklyn College were evenly divided into two opposing camps. 

Nothing’s too good for Daddy’s little princess.
  • The “JAPs” (Jewish American Princesses) had been gifted nose jobs as high school graduation presents and came to class loaded for bear i.e. they were out to land a nice Jewish boy preferably in pre-med or pre-law. I had never been in close proximity to such exotic creatures and gazed open-mouthed at them in class as they simultaneously adjusted their hair, stockings and bra while filing their nails and applying lipstick. I was a goy so I was invisible to them. They were brainless and harmless and at least afforded me a chubby or two.    
Vintage bearded lady
I think she sat behind me in Psych 101.
  • The “Rachels” and “Ruths” bore their Hebraic-honkers like a badge of honor. Their wiry hair was left to nature and they favored sandals, folk skirts and unshaven legs. Their moustaches were unshaven, too. They scurried around campus clutching to their peasant-blouse covered bosoms Joan Baez LPs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry books and Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm. (I wouldn’t fuck these hectoring yentas with your dick.)    

So… I was strolling across campus feeling like Joe College when a Rachel ran up to me screaming like a banshee, slavering like a bronco and demanding that I boycott class because LBJ was bombing Vietnam. She shoved a flyer into my hand and her unshaven face into mine and ranted about nukes, napalm and negroes. I thanked her and promised to read the flyer but she screamed into my face, “Nazi” and ran to her next target. I tried to proceed but was forced to walk a gauntlet of Rachels, Ruths and their male counterparts – the Bruces and Barrys. All screaming. All slavering. All thrusting flyers. All demanding that Brooklyn College be brought to a standstill because LBJ was bombing Vietnam.       

The very next day the Six Day War broke out between Israel and Egypt and I was back on campus for more testing. 

So… I was strolling across campus feeling like Joe College when the very same Rachel ran up to me screaming like a banshee, slavering like a bronco and demanding that I boycott class because LBJ was not bombing Cairo. She shoved a flyer into my hand and her unshaven face into mine and ranted about Auschwitz, Anne Frank and Arabs. I thanked her and promised to read the flyer but she screamed into my face, “Nazi” and ran to her next target. I tried to proceed but was forced to walk a gauntlet of Rachels, Ruths and their male counterparts – the Bruces and Barrys. All screaming. All slavering. All thrusting flyers. All demanding that Brooklyn College be brought to a standstill because LBJ was not bombing Cairo. 

In fact, these leftist humanitarians wanted Cairo nuked!       

Cairo – I figure 10 million dead before the Soviet retaliation.

Suddenly and e’en like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, I was knocked to the ground by a blinding light of revelation. I then picked myself up and stood in the center of Brooklyn College, in the center of Flatbush, in the center of Brooklyn and knew in the center of my Catholic, Italian-American soul that I was in enemy territory. The scales had fallen from my eyes! I knew that the Rachels, Ruths, Bruces, Barrys and, yes, even the JAPs were not me. Not mine. Not American. All their supposedly selfless political activism was all about them. (And, they have done nothing to dissuade me of that conclusion in the more than fifty years since my Damascene conversion.)

St. Paul on the road to Damascus
You think it was easy getting that horse on campus?

Day of Infamy

During the Six Day War, Israel, our supposed ally, deliberately attacked and attempted to sink the USS Liberty, an intelligence ship, observing the war from the Mediterranean. In order to prevent the Liberty from reporting Israeli war crimes, Israel killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171 more. Israeli planes even machine-gunned U.S. sailors attempting to escape in life rafts.

Meanwhile, Israeli dupes inside the White House almost gave my Brooklyn College classmates their dream. They almost tricked LBJ into nuking Cairo. (Take a minute to imagine that scenario.) Then, the dupes and LBJ conducted a massive cover up. The surviving sailors were ordered and threatened into silence. 

Israel claims its act of treachery carried out on a U.S. ship clearly flying the Stars and Stripes was a tragic mistake.  

 If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I wanna talk to you about. 

USS Liberty

POSTSCRIPT

In the 1970s, I learned that a former classmate at Brooklyn College had machine gunned many Palestinian women and children to death. When I knew this particular Bruce, he was a “peace & granola” hippie-dippie-trippie type. Then he got that Old Time Religion. From Meyer Kahane and the Jewish Defense League to the present, Brooklyn has been the breeding ground of Israel’s most violent fundamentalist lunatics.

Whenever I hear wild-eyed, wiry-haired women living on illegal Jewish settlements being interviewed with a baby on one hip and an uzi on the other, their Brooklyn accents are those of the Rachels and Ruths I first encountered on that bright June day in 1967 on the surprisingly bucolic campus of Brooklyn College.

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio 
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn
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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.”

________________________

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio 
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn
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Mongolian Porn Conquers Milwaukee

Billboard - Beautify America - Get a Haircut
Everyone was after my scalp!

Dilemma: I viewed the citizens of Milwaukee as my tribe – transplanted, Brooklyn stoop-sitters. But, they viewed me as a recruiting officer for the Viet Cong. 

Solution: I had to change how Milwaukee saw me. I had to shave my beard. I had to cut my hair. 

I loved my shaggy self, but I was hungry, broke and beaten. So, when a movie theater offered me work as an usher, but only if I took a haircut, I took a haircut. The barber howled with glee as he hacked away at my freaky flag while his waiting customers pointed and giggled at my humiliation. It was the most painful haircut I have ever taken and the worst. But, it worked. It made me invisible.

The duplex movie house that hired me was in downtown Milwaukee. Downstairs it ran Julie Andrews musicals while upstairs it screened what passed for porn in Catholic Milwaukee. Back in Sheboygan, I had seen the movie Goodbye, Columbus. When Ali McGraw dove naked into a swimming pool a celluloid covered the entire screen. Nude scene over – the disappeared. I was one shocked New Yorker. The locals didn’t even blink. But, Milwaukee was more sophisticated than Sheboygan. In fact, we screened the world’s only Mongolian soft-core porn film and that classic was held over for weeks. 

Vintage photo of Mongolian women in traditional dress
Linda Lovelace eat your heart out!

So, downstairs it was all little old ladies in hats and upstairs it all was dirty old men in trench coats. Oh, and the Vice Squad. They were upstairs a lot, especially for the Mongolian porn. They needed multiple viewings to fully grasp the depth of the film’s decadence. They’d push past me with a quick flash of the badge and a quick grunt of “Vice.” When I was bored, I’d tear the cinemagoers tickets and send the cinemagoers to the wrong cinema. I did so enjoy imagining their confused faces as they waited for Julie Andrews to break out of her bra and the naked Mongolians to break into song. 

I also had to skulk around both cinemas, flashlight in hand, ensuring that no one had their feet on the seats or was smoking in the “No Smoking” section or jerking-off in the “No Jerking-off” section. You gotta watch those little old ladies every minute! 

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio 
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn
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Bridge on the River Milwaukee

A drawbridge over the Milwaukee River
Ya gotta time your jump just right!

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.

Stoned hippie girl
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.

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio 
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase park in Coney Island, Brooklyn
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I Am A Fugitive From Milwaukee

Vintage movie poster for I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang
My fantasy life in celluloid

I reckoned my next/best hope was Milwaukee. (And, if that isn’t the textbook definition of a dilemma I don’t know what is.) But, I figured it was a big enough city where I could be anonymous and find a job – maybe even an acting job. If Milwaukee didn’t work out, I’d ride the rails. In yet another LSD-addled fantasy, I hallucinated my life as a rugged, soulful vagabond – Paul Muni in I Am A Fugitive from A Chain Gang, but with music by Woody Guthrie. I might even change my name to Woody or Slim and I would wear nothing but denim accented with red bandanas. I’d learn harmonica and my Mulligan Stew would be legendary in hobo jungles from Bangor to Baja. 

Yeah, just try and find me, Uncle Sam. So, one morning after Steve left for work, I left him a note. Then I grabbed my few rags, grabbed a Greyhound and made for Milwaukee aka “Beertown.” 

Vintage neon sign - Milwaukee Grill

Dilemma: Milwaukee was Sheboygan, only larger and less welcoming. Worse – it reeked of roasting hops, beer and beer vomit. I hated beer. I hated beer vomit. And, “Beertown” hated me. 

HHHEEELLLPPPP!

___________________________

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by jack Antonio
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn
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Mention My Name In Sheboygan

Vintage postcard of Sheboygan, Wisconsin
THEIR Town

Sheboygan looked like Our Town and it was. As in: “This is our town you no-good, long-haired, faggot hippie-freak! What the fuck do you think you’re doing in our town? If you so much as look at one of our women (not that a faggot like you looks at women), we’ll cut your dick off and throw it on the grill at our next Bratwurst Festival.” 

As I’d driven into Sheboygan, I’d passed this cheery, road sign – 

Welcome to Sheboygan!

Bratwurst capital of the world!

The sign was lined with the crests of the Knights of Columbus, Kiwanis, Rotary Club, Masons, Moose, Owls and Odd Fellows – everything but the Raccoon Lodge and the Mystic Knights of the Sea. But, the town’s “Welcome Wagon” committee hadn’t taken that big-hearted, big-bratwurst sentiment to heart; especially where bearded, longhaired, hippie-freaks were concerned. If you looked like I did and weren’t in college or crippled then folks, especially in places like Sheboygan, were mighty suspicious –

“Why aren’t you in the Army, boy?”

Sheboygan, Wi. welcome sign
Or… not!

You know the scene in the movie where the stranger walks down Main Street and merchants pull down their shades and hang the “Closed” sign on the door while parents cover their kids’ eyes and pull them indoors? That was me in Sheboygan in 1969. You know the movie scene in which the stranger turns a corner and walks smack into the high school football team who proceed to kick the stranger’s long-haired behind? That was me. Or, the scene where the town’s folk speak angrily about the stranger in the third person while the stranger is standing right next to them? Me, again. So, getting a job in Sheboygan in 1969 was near-on impossible. In fact, it was impossible. Employers asked to see my Draft card which listed me as 1A, which marked me as bound for Saigon which raised alarm bells about my being in Sheboygan and close to Canada. 

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