Boy Outa Brooklyn

By Jack Antonio

BOY OUTA BROOKLYN  
An actress is slaughtered. An actor is haunted.
A life is taken. A life is revealed.
Boy Outa Brooklyn is a murder-memoir driven by my obsession with the unsolved murder of my friend – Carrie. It is a filthy, funny, forensic examination of her death and my life which zooms from the violent streets of my Brooklyn boyhood to the porn-drenched streets of Times Square. This is the world of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and The Deuce and the world where Carrie came to die. 
Boy Outa Brooklyn is a celebration of lost New York written by a dissolute altar boy and unregenerate White Guy. It is a hard-boiled detective story and picaresque "Diary of An Actor You Never Heard Of" filled with tales of fights and flops on both sides of the Atlantic.  
Fans of Tropic of Cancer, Portnoy's Complaint, the comedy of Lenny Bruce and the works of Iceberg Slim, Jean Shepherd and David Sedaris will enjoy reading Boy Outa Brooklyn. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Banks of the Gowanus Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393645719

Jack Antonio

Jack Antonio has written and hosted popular television programs that are broadcast worldwide. He has acted on stages all over America and Britain - including on Broadway and in London's West End. He has performed in US and UK sitcoms, TV dramas and feature films. And, his voice can be heard in many cartoons and computer games.  In between acting jobs, Jack has done every degrading, demeaning job known to man. And, his work-life has been nothing if not bi-coastal. He has carried dead bodies out of hospitals in L.A. and cleaned public toilets in New York.  Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir is his first book

Book preview

Boy Outa

Brooklyn

a murder memoir

By

Jack Antonio

––––––––

Copyright © 2019 Jack Antonio – All rights reserved

For the Duchess

It’s all her fault

The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.

Lenny Bruce

Brooklyn Boy

––––––––

I said I was going to write the truth, so help me. And, I thought I was. I found I couldn’t. Nobody can write the absolute truth.

Henry Miller

Brooklyn Boy

––––––––

It is a phenomenon of our nature that that which is sad, terrible and even horrendous holds an irresistible attraction for us.

Friedrich Schiller

Honorary Brooklyn Boy

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

A CAUTIONARY TALE

1 BOY OUTA BROOKLYN

2 THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND TIMES SQUARE

3 MILLIONS TO FARM OCEAN BOTTOMS IN COMING WHIRLWIND

4 CONFESSIONS OF A CONFUSED CATHOLIC

5 THE SOUND OF BROOKLYN

6 ALTAR BOY CONFIDENTIAL

7 THOUGH THIS BE MADNESS, YET THERE IS METHOD IN IT

8 RIDING THE LIMP LOTHARIO EXPRESS

9 THE WAGES OF SIN

10 MENU FOR A STARVING ACTOR

11 THE ROACH MOTEL

12 MR. CLEAN

13 MEIN PORN

14 LIFE AND DEATH ON FORTY DEUCE

15 MONDO MIDTOWN

16 HELL IN HAPPY VALLEY

17 O HOLY NIGHT

18 HELP WANTED

19 THE CRAP CASEBOOK

20 A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE MOORS

21 MENTION MY NAME IN SHEBOYGAN

22 SOME ENTERTAINED ANGELS UNAWARES

23 VIA DOLOROSA

24 THE BOWERY BLUES

25 THE IRON DOOR

26 FORTY-FIVE

27 THANATOPSIS

PROLOGUE

Get this straight – I didn’t kill Carrie.

I didn’t kill her. I didn’t fuck her.

So, why am I ascared to begin this?

How long has it been? Forty years? More. Forty-five. Forty-five years and I can’t stop thinking about Carrie. Can’t stop thinking about her in that Brooklyn vestibule.

The vestibule is the small room that protects the interior of a brownstone or tenement from the street. It is found at street level or at the top of a stoop. It shelters the mailboxes. But, the vestibule didn’t shelter Carrie. The stoop is the staircase in front of a brownstone or tenement. It’s a Dutch word. Stoop. Brooklyn is a Dutch word, too. Breukelen. But, vestibule is a Latin word. Latin is a dead language. And, Carrie was found dead in the vestibule.

You need a key to enter the vestibule or you ring an outside doorbell to gain entry. But, what did Carrie know about vestibules? Carrie wasn’t a Brooklyn native. I was. Carrie didn’t know a lot of Brooklyn things. I did. For one thing, I knew the vestibule rules –

Do not enter vestibule if stranger is in it.

Wait for stranger to leave vestibule or call Super.

Never open vestibule door to stranger.

Never buzz stranger into vestibule.

If being followed, walk past vestibule and circle block.

When in doubt – scream and run.

The vestibule is also part of the heart. It’s the left ventricle below the aortic orifice. I didn’t stab Carrie in either sense of the word. But, someone did.

______________________

A CAUTIONARY TALE

December. 1978. Carrie has been dead for five years. It’s late on a snowy night and I’m walking back to the shoebox I’m subletting from a piss-queen who sings tenor in operettas. I’m sure that I’m alone until I hear snow-crunching footsteps behind me. Satchel Paige, the wise and wily baseball pitcher, advised: Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you. So, I don’t look back but I do quicken my steps. Then the person behind me quickens theirs. I begin a slow jog in case whatever is gaining on me means to do me harm. Jesus Christ, have I learned nothing from Carrie’s murder? I imagine the next day’s headlines:

ACTOR YOU NEVER HEARD OF – SLAIN

Suddenly the footsteps behind me break into a run. The hell with Satchel Paige. I turn to confront my attacker and see a young woman bolt past me. She runs down the middle of the street then dashes up her stoop with house keys jangling. She fumbles with the vestibule lock while casting panicked glances back at me the something that is now gaining on her. Spooked that I had spooked her, I break into a run. As I pass her building, I look up and see her face pressed against the glass window of her vestibule door. She is praying that I am not coming up the stoop to rape and kill her.

//////////

Twenty years earlier, a childhood friend had given me that same look from his vestibule window. All three of us were ascared. You read that right. Not afraid. Ascared. A wonderful word. A very Brooklyn word. I learned it from the big kids sitting on the stoop – "What a pissah, we saw dis monstah pitchah at da movies and we wuz really ascared."

I still am.

1

BOY OUTA BROOKLYN

I’m a Brooklyn boy. Born dead center in the 20th century– 1950 A.B. That’s Anno Brooklyn. In my Brooklyn, green canvas awnings shade the storefront windows and a glass globe filled with blue water swings over the pharmacy door. The butcher has sawdust on his floor and the grocer has a straw boater on his head. Kids are nicknamed Butch, Spike and Bruiser. (And, these are the girls!) Red and white striped poles twirl in front of the competing barbershops of Angelo and Nick. Angelo is humorless, maybe because he has a concentration-camp tattoo on his arm. But, Nick  has a devil-may-care manner and sports the pencil-thin mustache of a gigolo.

It is in the mirrored, macho salons of Nick and Angelo that I learn how to be  Homo Brooklyn. No, not that type of homo. (Whata you a wiseguy?) I mean a real Homo. A man’s man. A mensch. It’s where I learn the hard-but-fair rule of life – If you leave, you lose your turn. It’s where I learn to dismiss all current baseball players as overpaid pussies not worthy of carrying the jockstrap of Saint Joe DiMaggio. It’s where I learn the permitted hairstyles for Homo Brooklyn – Baldy, Flat Top and Elvis. It’s where I learn to distinguish between the after-shaves Bay Rum, Old Spice and Aqua Velva; and learn the proper application of Dixie Pomade – a hair goop thicker than axle grease. 

In Angelo’s and Nick’s, I ogle true-crime magazines – I Escaped the Vampire-Nympho of Newark!

And Hollywood gossip-rags –  I Escaped Tinseltown’s Nympho Pajama Party!

And men’s-adventure journals – I Escaped the Lair of the Lesbian Nazi-Nympho!

Most importantly, I learn how to hide dirty magazines like Gent, Dude and Dapper inside the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. When Nick and Angelo catch me, they threaten to tell my mother and give me a Baldy. But, I always spot a twinkle in their eyes as they shake their razor strops at me.

The Italian Grandpas in my neighborhood raise chickens in their yards and pigeons on their roofs. Grandpa Falco fattens and slaughters Thanksgiving turkeys in his basement where I visit the doomed birds before they go under his ax. Every fall, the Grandpas pool the grapes from their backyard arbors to produce a wine called Guinea Red – used to unclog toilets, eat rust off cars and quiet colicky babies. Every week, the Italian Grandmas cover every piece of furniture in their apartments with bed sheets, then cover every inch of those sheets with homemade ravioli in preparation for Sunday lunch. (These peasant women effortlessly transform their homes into ephemeral pasta-art installations that pre-date conceptual art by decades!)

The Italian Grandmas and Grandpas live on the ground floors of the fire-escape-covered tenements while the families of their married sons are stacked on the floors above. The Polish and Irish families in the neighborhood prefer to live near but not on top of each other. Polish and Irish life revolves around the bars found on every corner. The Polish bars are all named The White Eagle and the Irish ones are all named The Shamrock. The men who drink in the former are all named Stosh and the men who drink in the latter are all named Mick. The Italians drink Guinea Red at home, so it is the Polish and Irish kids who have to stand outside those bars yelling to their drunken fathers that it’s time to come home. And, it is those Polish and Irish fathers (and often mothers) who stagger home and throw pennies to us kids sitting on the stoop or fall down as they try to jump rope with the girls or play stickball with the boys.

The trolley-car depot on our corner connects tracks that snake from the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island. A nickel a ride. The screech and clatter of the trolleys lend a metallic obbligato to our lives. Adding to the street music of 1950s Brooklyn, horse-drawn carts clop over the cobblestones. They display fish on chopped ice, or enormous bottles of bleach, or they are junk-wagons whose drivers cry out, Any old rags, old junk. There is an accordionist who sings sentimental Italian ballads in the tenement backyards. Finishing with a flourish, he removes his hat and begs up to the empty windows, Anything, Ladies. Puhlleasee. The housewives pop their bobby pinned heads out of the windows and throw him coins – a fleeting assignation with a romantic stranger. And, for us kids, an Italian organ grinder appears looking like he should – handlebar mustache, stinky cigar, vest and crushed fedora. Sadly, he has no monkey but for a penny he lets me turn the organ handle and crank out still another sentimental Italian ballad.

Our tenement row faces Green-Wood Cemetery – the most beautiful green space in New York City and the most beautiful cemetery in the world. Green-Wood is the Victorian cult of death writ large in weathered tombstones, massive mausoleums and glistening monuments to the great and good of bygone New York. Sitting on my stoop, I am watched over not only by my Catholic Guardian Angel but also by a host of weeping Protestant angels draped across tombs and by a battalion of ivy-covered Civil War soldiers standing eternal sentry atop their graves.

The Battle of Brooklyn, the crucial battle of the Revolutionary War, takes place in Green-Wood Cemetery. George Washington loses but manages to escape across the East River while soldiers from Maryland fight a desperate retreating action across the cemetery and down into the swamps of Gowanus, where I will later work. The Marylanders are slaughtered on Third Street, where I will later live. Thus, my personal battles in Brooklyn trace the course of the Battle of Brooklyn.

As a child, long before I know this bloody history, I feel a kinship with the fallen rebels. Oh, I like Westerns but I love Easterns – movies set in Early America. I am instinctively drawn to them. I know every frame in John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk. I torture my family with the rebel yell from Alleghany Uprising and with my imitation of Paul Muni’s laughable French-Canadian accent from Hudson’s Bay. I want to live in that time and I’m sure that in a former life, I did. So, I devour everything in my history textbooks about Early America. And, when I walk on the dirt paths in Prospect Park, or hide in a weedy vacant lot, or merely jump over blades of grass sprouting through the sidewalk, I am transported to 1776 and have a musket in my hand and a powder horn on my hip. All this emotional connection, spanning centuries, is forged before I know that I am living on sacred, blood-soaked battleground. It is a psychic mystery of Brooklyn.

Facing Green-Wood makes me a cemetery buff. I seek out and feel at home in cemeteries and graveyards worldwide. My childhood spent confronting death and decay molds me in ways subtle and varied. But, being beside a monumental celebration of death far from being morbid or frightening lends my tenement row a peaceful, rural aspect. We are in Brooklyn but somehow separated from it and protected from the world. 

So, it is especially shocking when a few days before Christmas of 1960 death falls on us from the sky. Two airliners collide over the city in a snowstorm and one hundred and thirty-four die in what is then the deadliest disaster in U.S. aviation history. One plane plummets into a Staten Island park killing all on board. The pilot of the other plane flies over my neighborhood hoping to land in Prospect Park. He flies at rooftop level – so low that Christmas shoppers see the passengers' terrified faces frozen in the plane windows. The aircraft crashes to earth minutes from my house. With bitter irony, one wing shears the steeple off a church called the Pillar of Fire and the other slices into a funeral parlor. By chance, or grace, or pilot skill, the bulk of the plane falls into an intersection destroying miraculously few other buildings. But, all on board are killed along with two Brooklyn guys selling Christmas trees on the corner. The passengers’ lovingly wrapped Christmas presents lay strewn over the dirty snow banks. For many days, the burned-out fuselage sits in the street like a beached whale. My friends and I visit the crash scene and crawl over the charred wreckage.

The Great Plane Crash of Christmas 1960 – a legend of Brooklyn.

If you want to know anything about the legends of Brooklyn, if you want to know anything about anything, then sit on her stoops. No doubt some egghead sociologist has published a study –

The Brooklyn Stoop as Kinship Center, Hearth and Tribal Elder Throne in Post-Industrial Urban America.

I don’t have to read the egghead’s book because I was there– seated at the feet of the Elders. The stoop was my Harvard, my Chautauqua and my country-store cracker-barrel. But, there was no folksy suspender pulling and bromide spouting on the stoop. The grown-ups who sat there discussed everything and applied their built-in Brooklyn Bullshit Detector to it all.

Let’s say it’s a soft, summer evening in 1955. Dinner dishes done, the tenement housewives roll down their stockings and retire not to the drawing room but to the stoop to join their husbands and gas with the neighbors. The men are working on cans of beer. They clutch newspapers printed in Italian, Polish, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Gaelic. They are Micks, Polacks, Dagos, Swedes and Squareheads. They smoke Camels, Chesterfields, Parliaments, Winstons and Lucky Strikes. Mainly, Luckies.

The sun goes down and the sound of native drums wafts up to the stoop from down near the Brooklyn docks. Many of the men on the stoop work on those Mob-run docks. They are the longshoremen you see in On the Waterfront. But, not my father, he clerks on Wall Street in a suit and tie – almost royalty. The other men are cab-drivers, bus-drivers, truck-drivers, cooks, cops, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, firemen, milkmen, mailmen, janitors, alligator-wrestlers (That’s what Mr. Carlson told me he was.) and garbagemen – lots of garbagemen. Behind their backs, their wives insist they be called Sanitation Engineers. Decades later, I see this warning sign next to a Brooklyn street-sweeping crew –

Environmental Control Task Force at Work.

The garbagemen of the stoop would have laughed. But, the sound of those native drums is no laughing matter. The drums worry the men because where there are drums there are Puerto Ricans. PRs. Spics. Already in the 1950s, New York City has made a concession to these invaders by posting warning signs at the end of every subway car –

La via del tren subterraneo es peligrosa.

¡No salga afuera!

That’s the only Spanish we ever learn aside from the phrase that the Puerto Ricans shout incessantly - mira, mira. (Look, look.) So, we also dub them the mira-miras. But, whatever you call them, they’ve invaded Brooklyn and established a beachhead on the waterfront – crammed into collapsing tenements under the collapsing highway named the Gowanus Hump. (That’d make a great name for a band in trendy Brooklyn– Put your hands together for the Gowanus Hump!)

With gold crucifixes around their necks and gold teeth gleaming in the sun, the spics are on the move and getting closer. Their marching shoes are black cha-cha boots with extra-pointy toes and stacked heels. We call them, Puerto Rican Fence-Climbers or PFCs for short – perfect for scaling chain-link fences. The PRs even have a nightclub – La Cucaracha. It books major acts like Tito Puente. Before La Cucaracha opens, the only mira-mira stars we know are Desi Arnez and the Flamenco dancer Jose Greco. And, Jose is actually a wop from Flatbush! And, it sounds like Tito knows only one damn song because that’s all he or any other act at La Cucaracha play – all night long. Drums. Drums. And, more drums. They do it to drive us loco and to drive us out. I picture toothless Mrs. Ryan screaming out her window with hands clasped over her ears, Drums, those damn drums, I shall go mad. I warn her that, as in Tarzan movies, the time to worry is when the drums stop.

Hear that, Mrs. Ryan? Silence. They’re coming for us.

The men of the stoop have a grudging admiration for the athletic ability of the PRs.

You ever hear of the Puerto Rican Giants? Dem spics can play baseball.

Dem spics can play stickball, too. But, how the hell do they run so fast in PFCs and skin-tight, sharkskin suits? When West Side Story plays the local itch house, we all secretly root for the Puerto Rican Sharks over the White gang the Jets because the Sharks wear hip, black-leather wristbands and their wrists aren’t even sprained! And, they fly over chain-link fences in their Puerto Rican Fence-Climbers. Plus, the Sharks are marginally less queer than the Jets.

Ye Olde Brooklyn

While the men are at work and their wives are glued to daytime TV, my friends and I hijack the stoop and talk about sex and baseball and sex and stickball and sex and flying saucers and sex and cowboys and sex and Indians and sex and soldiers and sex and wrestling and sex and mostly sex. The oldest in our gang is nine. One of our most robust debates concerns the etymology of fuck. There are two schools of thought on this subject, both built on facts we’ve gleaned from historical films like Robin Hood and historical poems such as–

In days of old when knights were bold

and rubbers weren’t invented.

They tied a sock around their cocks and babies were prevented.

Both schools agree that fuck should properly be written F.U.C.K. but that is where they part etymological company. One school traces the word to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where if a Puritan man or woman was caught in the act of sexual intercourse outside the bounds of matrimony they were placed in wooden stocks in the town square, there to be pelted with verbal abuse and rotten vegetables. Burned into the stocks above their head were the letters F.U.C.K., meaning For Unnatural Carnal Knowledge. But, the other school traces fuck to Merrie Olde Englande when Olde Kinge Cole was on the throne. In his kingdom, even if you were married, a license was required to have sex. Once you had obtained this regal permission you were then allowed to Fornicate Under Consent of the King. This linguistic debate rages on the stoops of Brooklyn to this very day. 

Cunnilingus under Consent of the Church

Roman Catholics to a man, my friends and I believe that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman (There’s another kind?) does not make babies. Getting married makes babies. However, we believe that Puerto Rican girls believe that sexual intercourse makes babies. And, crucially, we believe that Holy Mother Church in her infinite wisdom has ruled that if a man has sex with a woman who believes sex makes babies then said man has not committed a mortal sin and is not in danger of losing his immortal soul. So, we all want Puerto Rican girlfriends. We want ’em bad. Real bad.

Our desire is stoked to a white-hot intensity when the big boys on the block tell us that the even bigger boys on the block have told them that their fathers have told them that Puerto Rican girls have hairy pussies from birth. I theorize it is due to the humidity in the tropics and those voodoo drums. (Thank you, Tito Puente.) I have this theory confirmed when I hide in the movie theater after the kiddie matinee and watch the sexploitation flick Macumba Love (twice) before being discovered by an usher and invited to leave – Get outta here, kid or I’ll shove a 2x4 up your ass. Yes, indeedy, I know all about hirsute tropical twat because I know all about macumba.

We altar boys sprawl on the stoop swapping comic books, flipping baseball cards and arguing over the relative merits of Mickey Mantle and Rocky Colavito. I’m a Yankee fan and Rocky plays for the Cleveland Indians but he is still my guy. He is part of the Italian-American Holy Trinity of Sports – Rocky Graziano, Rocky Marciano and Rocky Colavito. To prove my devotion, I own a Rocky Colavito model, Louisville Slugger baseball bat. When the Mickey vs. Rocky debate threatens to turn violent, we switch to the pleasurable diversion of imagining our honeymoons. We will spend our nuptial holidays in Puerto Rico melting mozzarella cheese all over the bridal bush. We will then clench the hardening cheese with our teeth and pull it away from our beloved’s box, thus crafting long, bubblegum-like strands. It will be as much fun as pulling mozzarella off a pizza – only better.

(You will find this fetish described by Krafft-Ebing. See: Mozzarella Muff-Munching by Degenerate, Pre-Adolescent Altar Boys in Brooklyn.)

No doubt about it. These isle temptresses have us by the balls. And, our balls haven’t even dropped yet. They are nothing like the women we know – sisters, mothers, aunts, nuns. (Don’t get me wrong – they’re sexy, too, especially some of the nuns!) But, these PR putanas are exotic and dangerous. They dress tighter, tease their hair higher and pluck their eyebrows pointier. They samba past the stoop, little knowing the sweet torment they cause. (Or, do they know?) Even in August heat, they wear black fishnet stockings that we call hot-socks. The lush, curly hairs on their unshaven legs form unruly, swirling patterns and seek freedom from the bondage imposed on them by the sheer black mesh. We are just the men to roll their stockings down (slowly, slowly) and feast on their follicular fecundity. One sultry wench, her hair perpetually in curlers, gives her rump extra English as she passes the stoop. We call her, The Wiggle. Once she is well out of earshot, the world-weary Tommy announces, Gentlemen, the angle of the dangle is equal to the mass of the ass. Tommy is eight.

As an adult, I take a haircut from Rosita – a Puerto Rican lady barber and The Wiggle’s evil twin. I nurse a stiffy through the shampoo. When she runs her fingers through my hair, I nearly faint. When she tells me, I remind her of Bill Bixby, I want to throw her down and break out the mozzarella. Instead, I reach under her skirt, spider-walk my fingers up her hot-socks and tickle her twat. Rosita flinches but does not back away. I slip my hand into her crotchless panties and playfully grab her thatch. She giggles and wiggles against my happy hand as it slithers into her sopping snatch as deep as my leather Shark wristband. Rosita groans then curses in Spanish and makes a sign of the cross. Suddenly her clam clamps shut around my wrist holding me in a vice-like grip. In a macumba voodoo-trance, she abandons herself to the drums being played by Tito Puente on her transistor radio. She adds castanet clicks with her scissors and comb and does the cha-cha back and forth on my arm while slipping and sliding in the spreading puddle at her feet.

Okay, that didn’t happen. But, it might have. Anyone looking in the barbershop window wouldn’t have noticed anything untoward. Mira, mira, they’d shout. There’s Rosita doing the cha-cha to Tito Puente. The guy getting a haircut in the chair next to me might have been nonplussed. But, Puerto Ricans are a tolerant sort. So, let’s just say, sticking my paw into Rosita’s dark, wet, secret places was not out of the realm of possibility.

And, I have it on good authority that neighborhood women found spic men sexy, or at least they liked those Latin gentlemen who refrained from making I’m sucking your vagina noises at them on the street. They liked the nice mira-mira men – like that nice George Chakiris the leader of the Sharks in West Side Story. George was a Greek but that’s almost Puerto Rican, right?

So, we all wanted to fuck the spics. We just didn’t want to live with them. And, with good reason – cockroaches. The PRs brought the roaches with them on the planes from San Juan. Mr. D’Amato informed me on the stoop, My cousin works at the airport and he sez, the mira-miras don’t even have suitcases. They carry all their crap in cardboard boxes and paper bags. Dem planes is crawling with roaches. Very plausible. Cockroaches love to hide in and eat cardboard and paper and anything else they can get their greedy mandibles on.

Puerto Ricans have greedy mandibles, too. They and their fellow Latinos devour my neighborhood one tenement at a time. It now boasts representatives from more Central and South American countries than the U.N. And, in lieu of curtains, the flags of Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti cover the tenement windows. The Italian delis have become bodegas. The shop that sold Our Lady of Fatima candles now sells candles for Erzulie - the Voodoo Goddess of Love. The formerly bare walls of the parish church are now covered by murals that would cheapen a Tijuana donkey act. Call them what you want – PRs, Latinos, Hispanics, beaners, squatemalans, people of color, mira-miras, spics – they conquer my neighborhood. They win. But for how long, I wonder? The Islamic call to prayer is now wafting up to the stoops opposite Green-Wood Cemetery from the still crumbling tenements beneath the Gowanus Hump.

There Goes the Neighborhood!

The men who sat on the stoop weren’t too worried about jigs, jigaboos, jungle-bunnies, spooks, spades, spear-chuckers, coons or porch-monkeys. And, they didn’t use the word nigger unless it was absolutely necessary.

Example: Hey, don’t nigger-lip my soda.

Translation: Take a swig but don't leave a ring of spittle around the bottleneck.

Still, African-Americans weren’t immune from the constant comic roasting that every ethnic group got from the wits on the stoop.

Stoop Jokes

What did they call the first Black test-tube baby?

Janitor in a drum.

What did NASA say when the first Black astronaut went into space?

The jig is up.

Since 1947 when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color line in baseball and making the Dodgers a great team, the local men had come to see all Negroes in a slightly more favorable light. Even my sports-hating mother gushed, "Why can’t all ballplayers be as well-spoken as that nice Jackie Robinson?"

Still, we knew that jigs were loud and liked their music louder. After all, Alan Freed staged his seminal, seismic Rock & Roll shows at the nearby Brooklyn Paramount Theater. And, that joint was jumpin’ with jigs. But, we didn’t hear and see the jigs every day, the way we saw and heard the spics. We had stupidly allowed the spics to get a toehold. We wouldn’t make that mistake again. So, the first time a Black family moved in, we got it out – in jig time. 

In 1959, a cabal of crypto-commies in City Hall schemed to break our solidly White neighborhood. Their plot was to use a Black family as the thin edge of their racial-engineering wedge. The camel’s nose in the tent. The nigger in the woodpile. These condescending technocrats moved what we would now call an African-American single-mother and her enormous multi-fathered brood into a dilapidated house on an otherwise tidy White street. (No doubt her brood is all grown-up and in prison now.)

I didn’t know this Black family had moved in ’til one morning I heard the siren’s wail and the crowd’s roar. I ran to the scene, pushed in among my friends and neighbors and joined their fist-pumping chant – Niggers out! Niggers out! It was the White, working-class version of We Shall Overcome. A hyperventilating Polish kid told me that the burn marks on the disputed house were from a firebomb thrown the night before and that bricks had been thrown through the windows that morning. City Hall’s early experiment in Diversity Is Our Strength was a spectacular failure spinning violently out of crypto-commie control.

The Irish cop in charge knew he had a riot brewing with maybe a lynching as the climax. The only solution was to get the Black family the hell out. Go back to your homes, the show’s over, he ordered through a bullhorn. But, we held our ground and formed a gauntlet from the front door of the house to the waiting squad cars. Then the nappy-headed mother and her endless stream of kids emerged. They looked like the circus act in which an endless stream of clowns emerges from a tiny car. But, we didn’t laugh. We fell silent. Were we shocked into silence by the mother’s youth? Shocked at how Southern-fried this family looked? The mother led the way, shielding an infant in her arms while the shithead-social-workers responsible for this fiasco shepherded her other kids through the tunnel of silent, staring Whites. I thought of the Catholic missionaries who were forced to walk a gauntlet of Iroquois braves and then had their fingers and toes chewed off by the women and children of the tribe. My friends and I enjoyed eating Brazil nuts. We called them nigger toes. But, we didn’t want to eat the toes of this family. We just wanted this family gone.

This was my first confrontation with that most odious and virulent parasite found in American society – the professional do-gooder. As they smirked and huffed past me, I knew in my nine-year-old blood that these crypto-commies belonged to an enemy race – as alien to my kind as the escaping Negroes. In fact, I felt more empathy with the Negroes. The Semitic features of the do-gooders, their self-regarding intellectual mien and self-consciously sincere attire identified them as graduates of a progressive college where they had studied pseudo-scientific Sociology at the feet of a Marxist moron. They had dedicated their lives to saving a suffering humanity – just not White suffering humanity. Us they hated. Us they were determined to destroy. Us they saw as ignorant blue-collar White scum who dared to stand up to their anti-White progressive agenda. You’ll notice these Hebrew humanitarians did not place this troubled and troubling Black family next door to their own mothers in Jewish Brooklyn. No, they decreed from on high that it was right and just and past time to integrate and thus enrich White, Catholic Brooklyn but White, Catholic Brooklyn decreed otherwise.

Stoop Jokes

What’s the smallest book in the world?

The Puerto Rican Who’s Who.

What do you call the Negro Who’s Who?

Who Dat?

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Maybe you think we were racist White scum for telling those jokes while protecting our patch. Maybe you haven’t spoken to a White, Oriental or Latino family that moved into a Black neighborhood only to be burned out. Maybe you don’t know the real-deal on race. You want the truth? Here goes – niggers and spics don’t like each other. Correction. They hate each other. In America’s prisons, the gang wars are between niggers and spics. The White gangs just stand aside and let ’em kill each other.

As child and adult in New York City, I hear nothing but anti-Negro venom from Puerto Ricans – and vice versa. That’s nuthin’. You ever hear how Jews talk in private about Blacks? Hell, you ever hear secular Jews talk about Hasidic Jews? Ya want more racial reality? The most racist opinions I hear about American Negroes come from Caribbean Negroes. And, that’s nothing compared to the low opinion that the people from South of the Border have of each other. One Puerto Rican tells me gravely, Man, you know these dirty, greasy spics who don’t wanna work and live on welfare and eat chicken and throw the bones out the window and everybody thinks they’re Puerto Rican? Nuh-uh, they’re Cuban.

Ask any boxing promoter. They know that the way to guarantee a big gate is to match a Haitian vs. a Dominican or a Nicaraguan vs. a Honduran. The fisticuffs in the ring are nothing compared to the donnybrook up in the cheap seats.

Thirty Seconds Over Brooklyn

Between race riots and stoop jokes I am warned, Kid, in your lifetime the mira-miras and jigs are gonna overrun America. Those words rattle the core of my Brooklyn being. They make me ascared because I know that the men of the stoop are not only cops and cabbies and garbagemen. They are prophets. They are Jeremiahs. So, when the Masters talk, I listen. And, when they lower their voices to discuss anything doity, I pretend to be too busy gazing into Green-Wood Cemetery to listen. But, I listen. Extra hard.

The over-arching theme of their colloquies is the incontrovertible fact that Brooklyn and the world are well and truly fucked. The rot set in with World War Two.  Joe McCarthy was right. We’d been betrayed by those Jews – the Rosenbergs, that fairy – Alger Hiss and those Jewish fairies in Hollywood. We’d fought on the wrong side in the war. Except for fightin’ the Japs. Those slant-eyed sneaks had it comin’.

Kid, do you know those Jap bastards stuck a thin, glass tube up a soldier’s prick? Then they smashed down on his prick with a hammer. Thousands of glass shards got embedded in his dick. Think about it. The poor son of a bitch survived but whenever he takes a piss, two guys have to hold him. 

Many of the stoop sages are veterans of World War Two. Joe Dante lost an arm on Guadalcanal but still holds down two jobs. And, veterans or not, everyone on the stoop agrees that the Allies should have unleashed General George Patton. At the end of the war, Patton wanted to go clear across the steppes of Russia and clean out those commie creeps once and for all. But, Truman wouldn’t let him.

"That’s why they killed him, grunts Joe Dante while crushing a beer can with his one remaining hand. You think Ike wasn’t in on it? Jeep accident my ass."

Let’s say it’s another soft, summer night in 1955. Only lightning bugs and burning cigarettes illuminate the faces on the stoop as they agree, again – We should have unleashed Patton. Later, only flicker from TV screens illuminate their faces as they sit on their sofas watching Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Again. And, sipping a beer, they murmur, again – We should have unleashed Patton. Their wives sipping beside them nod in agreement.

The wives are the keepers of the flame. They dust the military shrines that sit on top of their walnut-veneer TV consoles where the photos of dead soldiers lean against the alligator clocks.

Tommy sent that from Florida.

And, where the photos of dead sailors lean against the porcelain panthers.

We won that statue down Coney Island.

And, on their bedside tables a Tiki ashtray from the South Pacific Theater nestles beside a miniature Eiffel Tower from the European crusade.