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.
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.
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 X covered the entire screen. Nude scene over – the X 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.
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!
Even before the hit song by the Village People, everyone knew what went on at the YMCA. But, after a day walking around the streets of Manhattan and a night running around the moors of Scotland, I was too whipped to care. Plus, the “Y” was only minutes from the theater and Jersey wasn’t. So, I risked it. But, getting a room at the “Y” was not easy. It was a popular place for young Christian men to fellowship, evangelize and sodomize. The line at the check-in desk looked like a casting call for The Boys in the Band.
I’ll say one thing for these young Christian lads, they lived by the motto, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
So, I counted my blessings whenever I could get a four-dollar room with the all-important private shower. I felt like a real swell as I piled all the furniture against the door to dissuade unwanted visitors and watched Johnny Carson in glorious Black & White. For two bucks, I could get a private room but with a gang shower down the hall. One catch. There were nightly gangbangs in the gang shower. So, on two-buck nights, I’d wait until 4 AM when the orgy had finished then tiptoe down the hall and take a shower – fully clothed. For a buck, the “Y” supplied a bunk bed and a butt-plug.
While performing in Hamlet in New York, I stopped into Macy’s and saw a display for a new board game – The Game of Shakespeare.The demonstrator was a charming elderly actor with white beard and ascot – Commander Whitehead’s doppelgänger. We chatted about the Bard and the Biz. He had performed on Broadway decades before with Louis Calhern, Maurice Evans, Eva LeGallienne and Judith Anderson – top Shakespeareans all. I was careful not to allude to the disparity in our current positions but he was clearly devastated by that bitter reality. I wondered if he would survive the weekend.
“Please, God,” I prayed “shoot me before I become him.”
I worked in a mailroom with an actor who had been a stand-in for many of the close-harmony groups of the 1950s – The Four Freshmen, The Four Lads, The Four Aces, The Four Preps, The Four This, The Four That. People didn’t know what those singers looked like so it was easy to slip in a sub. His closet had been stuffed with plaid sports coats and college letter-sweaters. He had also been a busy jingle-singer on the radio. In the 1940s and ’50s, radio programs would broadcast live from New York then wait three hours for the time change and perform again for the West Coast. During those three-hour breaks, bored singers drank. He was bored. He drank away his wife, his voice, his career. He was twice my age and, like me, working for the minimum wage.
“Please, God,” I prayed, “shoot me before I become him.”
Luckily, I had become a Shakespearean scholar while sitting on the stoop
I met Don in 1969 in an off-off-Broadway theater buried in a supermarket basement on the lower West Side. The proximity of the stage to food made it a magnet to the largest cockroaches East of the Sun and West of 8th avenue. We actors developed the ability to smash the creepy critters mid-soliloquy without breaking our iambic pentameter rhythm or the audience noticing.
To be or not to be,
STOMP
That is the question.
It was my first acting job. I landed it right after I landed in New York from Milwaukee, Wisconsin where I’d been evading military induction, aka the Draft. I touched down; bought a showbiz paper at the first newsstand I passed and saw this audition notice –
Spear-carriers needed for Macbeth
No Pay
Again, my years of Shakespearean scholarship on the stoop paid dividends.
Like Gene Kelly in an MGM musical, I raced to the theater with luggage in hand. I’d like to say it was a straw suitcase but it was a duffel bag. I’d like to say I auditioned on a large stage facing red velvet seats but it was in a filthy hallway facing cases of Velveeta cheese. I’d like to say I auditioned for David Merrick but it was for Mark Fink. I’d like to say I had his undivided attention but he read his mail. I’d like to say he wasn’t a married queer on the prowl but he was.
Fink leered to me that I had a touch of genius but that we must keep that a secret lest it spread jealousy in the ranks of the spear-carriers. He used the same line on all the spear-carriers. And, you’ll notice it’s the same line used by Professor Pervowitz. But, unlike that creep, Fink never asked me to masturbate at his feet while saying I was his bitch-slut-cunt. Fink just tried to suck my cock. When I resisted, he reverted to that hackneyed homo ploy, “What are you afraid of finding out?”
Hmmnn… maybe there’s a Showbiz Scumbag College where they learn these seduction techniques.
I am to stand guard at the entrance to the Mat Room – a small room with a wrestling mat on the floor and… well… that’s all. I guess if the sophisticates in attendance aren’t in the mood to “party down” of an evening they can hold a tag-team match. But, I must enforce the strict “couples only” policy; namely – if one-half of a couple leaves the Mat Room the other must follow. This is to avoid an unbalanced male/female ratio of swingers. However, Mat Room etiquette does allow for consensual gangbangs. So, I will be janitor, bouncer and Poet-In-Residence in this bordello. No problemo. My resumé attests to the fact that I am man enough for all three jobs.
Wait a minute, you’re my wife!
I will also be tasked with tidying up the “Adam and Eve Rooms.” These airless closets are barely large enough to hold a mattress, an ashtray on the mattress and a bare, red light bulb hanging over the mattress. Once Adam and Eve have left their closet Eden and retired to the disco to feast on the sumptuous buffet nightly, it will be my appointed task to squeeze into the cramped closet, squeeze a clean sheet onto the mattress and squeeze a few squirts of Air-Wick into the now funky air to restore its paradisiacal aroma. Oops. Almost forgot. Have to empty the ashtray.
This could be me at the start of my graveyard shift with beeper locked and loaded.
Like most New York actors who think a move West will magically revive their fortunes, I find the trajectory of my L.A. career to be somewhat less than meteoric. In fact, 1981 finds me working as a security guard in Happy Valley Hospital just outside Los Angeles. It sounds like a “funny farm” but it isn’t. You’re thinking of Camarillo State Hospital – the insane asylum that housed Charlie Parker and other jazz-junkies. That’s where Parker wrote his tune Relaxin’ At Camarillo.
This could be me in the middle of my graveyard shift with beeper locked and loaded.
My job at Happy Valley entails walking around in a pretend-cop uniform to reassure people of something or other while carrying a clipboard, jiggling a few doorknobs and reading a few gauges. I have no idea what the fuck I’m reading but I tap the gauges with my pen, nod sagely and pretend to write something on my clipboard. I also have to raise and lower the American flag. This duty is taken seriously by the numb-nut who trains me to be his replacement. He’d been in the National Guard and knows a thing or two about flag raising and flag lowering and especially flag folding – “Now, do it agin and git the triangle-fold tight this time.” He is a Moron First Class.
In the late 1960s, the Lower East Side and especially St. Mark’s Place is the epicenter of New York’s hippie-yippie-trippieworld. It is Haight-Ashbury East. It is lined with head shops, record-shops, bookshops, poster-shops and vintage-clothes shops. The sidewalk is packed with freaks, frauds and fools. It’s fun. But, by the early 1970s, when Rob and I move in, St. Mark’s is lined with strung-out hippie-junkies and emaciated speed-freaks – the kids who forgot to get off the train before it hit the wall. They are gawked-at by tardy tourists in from Omaha and Osaka. (“Is this where the hippies live?”) In 1968, I see a Black hippie digging for food in a macrobiotic restaurant’s garbage can. Fifty years later, I see him doing the very same and he looks remarkably healthy. I’m astounded that the macrobiotic manure hasn’t killed him.
“Damn, that vein was here a second ago.”
In the early ’70s, now that their patchouli-oil bubble has burst in an explosion of exceptionally sour disappointment, the hippie-junkies and emaciated speed-freaks feel it is their right to “liberate” money from others – “This is a stick-up… er, I mean, this is a revolution, man.” Young actors are easy prey. So, when returning home late at night, Rob and I avoid the sidewalk and practice our broken-field running down the middle of the street. We figure this gives us more chance of evading any muggers or bullets headed our way.
Boy Outa Brooklyn 