urban survival strategy – Boy Outa Brooklyn

Bouwerie Reverie

Sleeping derelict on the Bowery in NYC — **Our Doorman.**

Scrambled eggs gave me the idea to blow my girlfriend Lynda’s brains out with my father’s shotgun. Scrambled eggs plus the stickiness, pissiness that overcomes a body in the New York summer heat – a heat not helped when that body is in a 5^th-floor walk-up loft on the Bowery with no air-conditioning or fan. And, this was when the Bowery was The Bowery. Like Rob and I on St. Mark’s Place and my acting group and I on West 42^ndStreet, Lynda and I were playing at being pioneers on a street infamous as the bottom of the urban barrel. After a man had drunk himself down to the Bowery, his next stop was Potter’s Field.

Since those days of yore and gore, St. Mark’s Place, West 42^ndand the Bowery have been prettified beyond recognition and way beyond my price range.

Oy, if only I bought when I had the chance!

The Ramones at CBGB — **The Ramones in front of the Carnegie Hall of Punk.**

The legendary punk-rock club CBGB was across the Bowery from our loft but watching pink-haired punks shit, piss, bleed and vomit on each other lost its charm surprisingly quickly. Besides, why cross the street? On our side of the Bowery, we had every wino in New York shitting, pissing, bleeding and vomiting on our doorstep.

Tell me, when’s the last time you climbed over a mountain of stewed cretins wallowing in their own excreta just to get in your front door?

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

Come and meet those dancing feet!

Peep Show performers in the 1970s on 42nd Street, Times Square, NY — **Our neighbors on 42nd Street**

That’s why in 1974 New York and with hopeful hearts,my acting group dared to move into a rat’s nest flanked by porn shops. The customers of those shops received blowjobs for five bucks in the alley behind our theater. Those blowjobs were administered by Black trannies who resembled New York Giants linebackers dressed in hot pants and halter-tops. Our actresses had it extra-tough getting to and from our new home. They had to maneuver through pickpockets, pill-poppers and pimps while enduring wolf-whistles from Elvis Presley look-a-like diesel-dikes. If the actresses skirted the well-lit but obnoxious 42^nd Street, they were easy prey on the dark and un-policed 41^stand 43^rdStreets.

Black-trannie prostitute in NYC — **All yours for $5**

When we compared travel-tips, we discovered that we had independently stumbled onto the same survival strategy. To avoid being maimed, mugged or murdered, we acted nuts. The primal animal in us instinctively knew that predators didn’t eat sick prey. So, we acted sick. We walked down 42^ndstreet talking to ourselves and to Jesus. We laughed hysterically at everything and at nothing. We cried out to the Mayor and the Martians. We limped. We played retarded. Under serious threat, we had cerebral palsy.

It worked.

Carrie was a year dead by the time we discovered this survival ruse. It might have saved her life.