Black Cracker Online

Richard Jaccoma's THE WEREWOLF'S TALE

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

I don’t know if he invented the genre—but Richard Jaccoma has melded vampires, werewolves and sex scenes in his fiction longer than virtually any other writer currently in vogue. This, in a volatile mix of Old Lefty politics. Lesbo vampire pirates meet commies, mummies ’n’ Nazis. The political slant reflects the leanings of Jimmy Underhill, which gives Jaccoma’s detective noir its unique flavor. The pornographic parts merely describe action that would have been omitted in Chandler or Hammett’s time. Many of Jaccoma’s stories saw light in the men’s magazine demimonde, now part of the last century. Jaccoma is, to say the least, a master pornographer.

Any rational thinking reader acquainted with his first novel would be forced to agree on one controversial matter concerning Richard Jaccoma: The Yellow Peril, published in hardcover by Putnam in 1978, contained a point-by-point blueprint for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Indiana Jones franchise emerged during the following decade. Jaccoma took the gentleman’s path, so to speak, and decided to forego unpleasant litigation that might have resulted in a slam-dunk settlement.

He put his energy into a series of high-adventure pulp novels that are only pulp on the surface. The Werewolf’s Tale begins in New York, 1939. Poland is on the brink of falling to the Nazis, and Jimmy is drinking off his 1930s sorrows in Germantown on the upper east side of Manhattan. He barroom brawls with Nazi sympathizers from the German-American Bund. Mysterious Asian folks are “Orientals,” an incorrect term these days unless referring to rugs. Who would have known that Manhattan was awash in mysticism, the occult and cannibalism?

So will today’s youth, whose political consciousness was awakened by Occupy Wall Street, be intrigued by this 1930’s brew of Lefty politics and occultism? Would followers of Taylor Swift (“Swifties”), Katy Perry or the Twilight series get turned on by Jaccoma’s narratives of violent sex with werewolves? My guess is that The Werewolf’s Tale will indeed unlock the disturbed sexual fantasies of teenyboppers. And elevate their social consciousness. Originally published in 1988, it raises the bar a few notches to the Left of Sookie Stackhouse. And will provide young readers the thrills they’ve paid their money for. Especially when describing the alien spice of the female werewolf’s steaming breath; the sweet, pungent musk of her fur, the emerald green glow of her eyes through membranous lids. If that isn’t romantic enough, this succubus violently rapes hero Jimmy Underhill, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, fighter of fascists. Artfully plotted, and with more substance than most pulps of yore, Jaccoma wears his politics on his sleeve. And they are correct by righteous standards.

The Werewolf's Tale is now available on Kindle, HERE.

© 2012 Josh Alan Friedman

"As Chanukah Passes Me By"

2011-12-20T23:36:00.000-08:00

To watch on YouTube, click the image above. To watch via Vimeo, click below.

© 2002, 2011 Josh Alan Friedman

Video by Wyatt Doyle & Josh Alan Friedman, with artwork by Drew Friedman. Visit DrewFriedman.net

"Thanksgiving at McDonald's in Times Square"

2011-11-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

To watch on YouTube, click the image above. To watch via Vimeo, click below.

Josh Alan's first 45.

To purchase your digital copy of the original "Thanksgiving at McDonald's in Times Square" single, click here.

© 1988, 2011 Josh Alan Friedman

Video by Wyatt Doyle & Josh Alan Friedman, with artwork by Drew Friedman. Visit DrewFriedman.net

Josh plays "Thanksgiving" live here.

Al Goldstein, BENEATH CONTEMPT

2011-11-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

Jack Stevenson is a writer and film-festival curator in Denmark. His bird's-eye view into the odyssey of Al Goldstein and Screw comes from a uniquely European perspective--where America's madness can be sanely analysed and enjoyed. I recommend this book to the Queen of England.

"New history and fresh insight into that counter-cultural battering ram once known as Al Goldstein. Stevenson's work has resulted in something rarely seen: an important book. (Full disclosure: I don't come off too bad, either.)"

--Josh Alan Friedman (Tales of Times Square)

Order your copy of Beneath Contempt from Amazon here.

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2011-10-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

He made it to Barney Miller's station house on seven occasions (playing seven different characters), Kojak twice and The Streets of San Francisco three times. A television mainstay, he's guested on series from Benson to Twin Peaks to Beverly Hills, 90210. He acted for the incomparable Robert Downey, Sr. in No More Excuses, Pound and Greaser's Palace. He's memorable in Bugsy, The Star Chamber and Weekend at Bernie's. But the role he's probably best known for is his unforgettable comic turn as Ernie, the jumpy Teutonic mortician, in Return of the Living Dead.

Just in time for Halloween, the great Don Calfa does the cover!

Send your good wishes to Mr. Calfa on Facebook here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2011 Wyatt Doyle

"Bela Lugosi" from THE WORST!

2011-10-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

From THE WORST! Josh Alan's original musical based on the life of Ed Wood.

THE WORST! is available on CD and digital download from CD Baby. Click here to purchase.

© 1994, 2011 Josh Alan Friedman

Video by Wyatt Doyle, with artwork by Drew Friedman (from WARTS AND ALL by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman). Visit DrewFriedman.net

Kiss My Big Black Ass: Jerry Leiber’s Life in Spades

2011-09-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

Atlantic Records co-founder Jerry Wexler and songwriter Jerry Leiber both related this anecdote:

Leiber never went out to see live music—not even his own groups like the Coasters, Drifters or Elvis. But in June 1971, Wexler coaxed him to attend closing night of the Fillmore East. The moment The Allman Brothers, an Atlantic/Capricorn group, broke big. Leiber was claustrophobic and couldn’t stand crowds. Furthermore, he told Wexler, “These guys are your band, they’re bad-ass musicians—but I don’t know who they are, and I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about them or the Fillmore.”

Wex said, “There are people around the world who idolize you. You don’t go out to music, you don’t fuckin’ know. I told Duane Allman I’d bring you up to the dressing room and he said, ‘You’re full of shit. Jerry Leiber’s been dead for years.’ I want to prove that my word’s good.”

So they go to the Fillmore, where flowers are arranged on reserved seats for the two Jerrys.

“I sat in the audience,” said Leiber, “and it started to fucking rain on the inside of the theater. I panicked and told Wex to get me the fuck out of here, but it was too crowded to leave. He said somebody set off the sprinkler system but there’s no fire. I said I don’t give a fuck, get me out of this goddamn auditorium. We went to the exit which was barred shut, bolted from the outside because kids were trying to break in.”

Wex turns to Leiber, who’s soaked, and says, “Hey, man, do this for me. Just this once. Come visit Duane.”

“I’m about to have a heart attack,” remembered Leiber, “there could be a fire, the doors are barred. And he’s worried what Duane Allman thinks, to show I’m alive to impress him. Wexler collects people like big-game hunters collect heads.”

So Wexler maneuvers them into the dressing room. Duane Allman is shirtless, pale and skinny, whacked out of his skull while stringing his Les Paul. (He would be killed in a motorcycle wreck a few months after this night.)

Wexler says, “Duane, didn’t I promise you? Well, here he is. Jerry Leiber.”

Allman stares up hazily at this wet, anxiety-ridden figure.

“You’re fulla shit. Jerry Leiber’s been dead for four years.”

“I’m not kidding you, this is the man,” says Wexler. “Tell him who you are, Jer.”

“I wanted to say I’m Max Schmeling, leave, and destroy the moment for Wexler forever,” Leiber remembered. “I could see it meant so much to Wex, so I complied. ‘He’s telling the truth. I’m Jerry Leiber and I didn’t die four years ago.’ But whatever I said was gonna be pointless.”

The most potent songwriter and producer of the rock ’n’ roll era was such an iconic, remote figure, that 24-year-old Allman thought it was some con. As if Jerry was a myth, couldn’t possibly exist. Leiber bolted out of there, more resolute than ever to avoid live concerts.

Well, forty years later, as of last week, Jerry Leiber is now finally not alive. My father brought him home and introduced me in 1965, when I was nine years old and clueless. Some guy who’d written Elvis’ songs before my time, which meant nothing to me. But he also wrote something called “Kansas City,” that just appeared on Beatles ’65. That fact got my attention in a big way. It was straight-out rock ’n’ roll, different than regular Beatle songs, the odd music they’d apparently grown up on.

The sheer magnitude of what Leiber & Stoller accomplished is mind-boggling—they fathered rock ’n’ roll, they put the dominant AABA song structure in popular music, and were the first to be called “record producer.” They began as R&B songwriters, and I wonder whether they ever listed their mission statement on tax returns: Making Black Folks Laugh.

I never let cosmic distractions, as listed above, get in the way of friendships. Especially when preparing cornbread and ribs in the kitchen with Jerry Leiber, like an old Jewish grandma. As with any great figure, you’re also dealing with a mere human being. He had a preference for writer friends over music people. He grew up in a Baltimore slum speaking Yiddish, but learned meter from Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe (also from Baltimore). He devoured Proust as a child. Privately, he kept revising the lyrics from songs he wrote long ago, always reaching for what he considered to be the perfection of Irving Berlin.

The “playlets”—those 50 two-and-a-half minute radio plays that Leiber & Stoller did with their alter-ego vaudevillian do-wop group, The Coasters—were the most lyric-driven canon of songs ever written. Leiber & Stoller’s range was magnificent, from early ditch blues to late Sinatra. “The Girls I Never Kissed” would have been a smash, had Sinatra’s voice only behaved during two attempted recording sessions.

Jerry Leiber bequeathed me the only unreleased song from the Leiber & Stoller catalog of the 1950s, “Strike A Match.” The song takes place in a dimly lit Negro bar where, after dancing and before the first kiss, the guy tentatively asks the girl to: Strike a match/Let me see/Yo’ face/Yo’ face.” They’d written it for Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy. Then it got lost in a closet for 45 years. Leiber thought the three greatest male blues voices were Memphis Slim, Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf.

“I can’t sing like that,” I said. And didn’t want to affect a Black voice. Different physiology.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s attitude.”

“Strike A Match” came out, if such could be said, in 2001. A few years later Leiber agreed to produce a solo album of me doing his purest blues songs. He hadn’t really been in the studio in a few decades. Not since the ’70s when he and Mike Stoller last produced Peggy Lee, Elkie Brooks, Procol Harum, a T-Bone Walker tribute album, and Stealers Wheel, including the single “Stuck in the Middle with You.” After that, they even refused the Rolling Stones.

So why, you might ask, would Leiber take interest in a bum such as I? Well, many entities that Leiber & Stoller bestowed their magic upon were cherry-picked from out of nowhere. That’s how those groups became famous.

“I wrote for people I loved,” he once told me. “The rest got my leftovers.” So maybe I was getting his leftovers. And I knew I was born too late. Come back 30 years ago, and he’d put you on the charts. He could do it with anybody.

He also produced the construction of his early 20th century Greene & Greene-style house like a record, in Venice Beach, California. He put me up there for a manically enchanting week. We rehearsed some and even attempted to write new songs. Off the clock, bullshitting, Jerry’s wit was sharp as ever. He still maintained a childlike playfulness in his genius with language and could pull lines out of the sky like lightening.

But when play turned to work, it turned mundane. He immediately excised all lines about gynecology from a song of mine. And the song was about a gynecologist.

“But Jer, that’s the best stuff.”

“Whaddya crazy, you can’t say that shit.” Well, I figured, maybe he knows what he’s talking about.

The first session was booked at Nightbird, his son Jed’s recording studio under the Sunset Marquis Hotel, near the Leiber & Stoller offices. On the way to the studio, Jerry got a call from the studio manager who wanted his credit card number. Jerry had originally financed the whole joint, and here his son was going to charge him by the hour. He went ballistic over the phone—and thus our production was, predictably, cancelled. There was no way Jerry Leiber was going back to the studio, any more than Muhammad Ali was going back to the ring.

I spent a year under unpaid contract with him, to be billed equally as co-writer of his autobiography. It was to be called Kiss My Big Black Ass. The cover was to be a mule’s ass, its head turned around with the face, naturally, being that of Jerry. Leiber’s handlers were, of course, appalled, and pressed on for a sanitized Leiber & Stoller autobiography to be written with David Ritz, the official biographer of music pioneers. Ritz had about eight other books going that year. Stoller wanted a mannered, politically correct book that, in spirit, might be called, And Then We Wrote...

But Jerry always reached for the jugular. Even with his talented sons, who endured the most stinging Jewish-father tsuris since Abraham bound Issac to the altar (Look at you, you’re 50 years old and never had a Top 10 hit.).

I salvaged some of our material for the 77-page lead-off chapter of Tell the Truth Until They Bleed. Though he gave his permission, he ended up furious with several revelations. A few tidbits about money, and his tendency to become what he called “Grandma Hyde” (as in Dr. Jekyll) and go off the deep end, destroying one project and collaborator after another. But there remained an abundance of unpleasantness that I left out of my book forever, in deference to my enormous respect for both Leiber and Stoller and their legacy.

Leiber & Stoller’s Brill Building office had the highest level of staff songwriters in history. Inspired by Jerry and Mike, they worked 9-to-5 in little piano cubicles. The smaller the cubicle, the bigger the hit. Songwriting was a highly specialized craft and art in Leiber’s heyday. Most groups did not write their own material. That was left to experts. If you take a cold look at what happened in the wake of Dylan and the Beatles—suddenly everyone in the world was a songwriter, and groups wrote their own songs. There was a burst of collective genius in those times. But songwriting basically changed from a professional’s domain to a free-for-all where amateurs took over the ship. To this day. If you don’t see any disparity in that, compare your songs to the full-time professionals of Leiber & Stoller’s stable—Goffin & King, Barry and Greenwich, Pomus & Shuman, Mann and Weil, early Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond. There’s a difference, right? Songwriting was a business.

Jerry Leiber occupied his own hipster universe: “I have no sense of long distance and time and ancient history. It’s like we cut our songs last night.” He was a walkin’, talkin’ street-wise sharpie, the embodiment of his own songs. He was reckless, but a great connoisseur of clothes, art and ghetto cuisine. Turned on by intellectually pretentious women, several notches down from pretty. He felt double-crossed by everybody, and double-crossed them back.

But I believe Jerry Leiber was wittier, greater and more important than Irving Berlin. I love and miss the bastard. I imagine the mythical Jerry in his final hours, like the character of his song “D.W. Washburn,” a gentleman who won’t get up from the gutter with his bottle of wine. Who toasts his saviors, but says No Thanks, “I believe I got it made.”

"Strike a Match" by Josh Alan Band. Fire it up.

© 2011 Josh Alan Friedman

"Famous & Poor" LIVE in Dallas

2011-08-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

Josh Alan performs "Famous & Poor" live at the Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas, TX. August, 2011

"Down Home Girl" Live at Alias Books East

2011-08-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

To watch on YouTube, click the image. For Vimeo, see below.

Featuring Jerry Leiber's original, suppressed lyrics. Live From Alias Books East, Los Angeles, June 2011.

© 2011 Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

Editor's note: In an unhappy coincidence, we've learned of Jerry Leiber's passing today. May he rest in peace.

Wanted! More Readers Like...

2011-08-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the mailbag:

Josh -
For the record, not so famous guys are among your readers too. (Your book cover ended up as a Kilroy Was Here look, but it still works.)
- Michael

Self-described "not-so-famous" Texas-based novelist/actor Michael Zagst is author of M.H. Meets President Harding, The Sanity Matinee, The Greening of Thurmond Leaner, The End of the World, Blood Flow and The Wonderful World of Color. Several have recently become available in electronic format.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

"Rollin' / Just as I Was" (w/ Rev. Raymond Branch)

2011-08-07T01:03:00.000-07:00

To view on YouTube, click the above image. To watch via Vimeo, see below.

Rev. Branch merges "Rollin'" and "Just as I Was" while Josh Alan taps out percussion on the body of his Martin. Live from the Heavenly Rainbow Baptist Church, June 2011

Visit Rev. Branch here.

Josh Alan LIVE w/Kinky Friedman TOMORROW!

2011-08-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

Josh Alan plays live with Kinky Friedman for KNON's 28th Anniversary Celebration in Dallas, TOMORROW, August 6th! Music starts at 8 p.m., or sign on for "Dinner With the Friedmans" and sup in the company of the Black Cracker himself (and the Kinkster) at 6 p.m.

Details & tickets at KNON's website here.

View Larger Map

End of an Error: The Farewell Column for SCREW

2011-08-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

It’s been 25 years since I wrote my farewell column for Screw’s “Naked City” listings. This back section of the paper contained some 200 capsule reviews of New York City’s peep shows, porn theaters and sex establishments (virtually all defunct now). Each week opened with a report from the streets, interview from a burlesque dressing room, or editorial.

Reprinted from Screw, June 23, 1986

END OF AN ERROR

This week marks the 225th Naked City column I’ve written under my own byline. It is also the last.

When I first inherited this wild beast of a job, in Issue #678, March 1, 1982, I was then Senior Editor of Screw. I’d been editing “Tony Esperanto’s” Naked City as part of my weekly function. Esperanto was the pen name of another Screw editor who’d done Naked City for five years. I never wanted to take over these listings, but it seemed inevitable. Custom had it, since the inception of Screw, that whoever handled Naked City would use an Italian pseudonym. That way, some mobster couldn’t threaten whoever gave his massage parlor a bad review, or might figure it was written by some Guido you don’t fuck with. For years, Naked City carried the byline “Rocco.”

I was never one to believe in pseudonyms, and thus remember a few sleepless nights after I took over this column. Several dives objected to their lowered ratings, and protested through odd and varied means of communication. One obvious tactic a proprietor might take upon a lowered cock rating in Screw was to mail me an onslaught of letters. Every letter purported to be a regular reader of Screw who was outraged that his favorite club had been lowered in the ratings. Each of the 30 letters would have the same town post office mark, or be written in identical style, thereby exposing the owner’s obvious ploy. Fake letters became quite easy to differentiate from authentic ones.

This column has taught me how to write like no other training ground—simply because I had to make a deadline every week, for four-and-a-half years. It was often an edgy, nervous type of writing, because you were reviewing the kind of joints that maybe the owners didn’t want anyone nosing around or drawing attention to. The stripper profiles were most fun, particularly Hyapatia Lee, Candy Samples, Kelly Everts, even last week’s backstage romp with Sue Nero. My “Sex in Brooklyn” series and “Sex in Queens” series, as well as anything to do with the Harmony/Melody Burlesk, stand out as peculiarities that only Al Goldstein’s World’s Greatest Newspaper would cover. “The Consumer’s Guide to Erotic Entertainment,” a lame subtitle I inherited under the Naked City logo, was the world’s first Ralph Nader-type watchdog listing for the consumer pecker. These establishments exist, so why the hell not have a protective customer guide for them?

If I saw a horse vomit in Times Square, spent Thanksgiving at McDonald’s, Christmas in the drunk tank, or imagined I saw the lights go on at the All-Live, Whirly-Girly Revue on 46th St., first time since ’62—I could write about it, then see my nightmare produced in smeary newsprint the next week in this column, off my chest and onto yours. Even if only two people might read it. But if any of my loyal readership feels a tinge of regret over my departure, let me refer you to my new book, out in a week: Tales of Times Square, published in hardcover by Delacorte Press. It contains the meat of every secret I’ve learned from Naked City, and my 10-year association with Screw. It is like this very column, although “respectably” packaged so that thousands (hopefully millions) can read about Times Square throughout the world.

As for the work I’ve done herein, protecting you, the unlaid, masturbating Screw reader—laying my cock on the line so that yours may be safe—I’ll give myself a 3 1/2 rating. The sex biz is really on the skids. But I drink a toast to all the joints and dives listed here, ’cause they’re more humane than what’s gonna replace ’em.

Farewell, suckers.

artwork by Drew Friedman. Visit his blog.
text and photos © 1986, 2011 Josh Alan Friedman

"What'd I Say"

2011-07-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

Josh Alan rips up "What'd I Say," live at The Kessler, Dallas, TX
From "Black Saturday," March 20, 2010

"Tush" Live at Alias Books East

2011-07-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

To watch on YouTube, click the image. For Vimeo, see below.

Live From Alias Books East, Los Angeles, June 2011.

© 2011 Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

Wanted! More Readers Like

2011-07-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Pantheon comedian, actor, director and scenarist Buck Henry does the cover.

Review Mr. Henry's truly impressive career on IMBD here.

Click here to read a fine 2010 interview with Mr. Henry from Vice magazine's online archives.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2011 Wyatt Doyle

"So Soon" w/Rev. Raymond Branch

2011-07-04T23:23:00.000-07:00

To watch on YouTube, click the image. For Vimeo, see below.

Reunited a year later in the pews of the Heavenly Rainbow Baptist Church, Rev. Branch and Josh Alan improvise a new arrangement of one of Rev. Branch's standards, "So Soon." June 2011.

Visit Rev. Branch online at www.RevBranch.com. You can see a Rev. Branch solo performance of "So Soon" here.

© 2011 Rev. Raymond Branch, Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

Josh Alan LIVE w/Kinky Friedman, August 6

2011-06-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

Josh Alan plays live with Kinky Friedman for KNON's 28th Anniversary Celebration in Dallas, August 6th! Music starts at 8 p.m., or sign on for "Dinner With the Friedmans" and sup in the company of the Black Cracker himself (and the Kinkster) at 6 p.m.

Details & tickets at KNON's website here.

View Larger Map

"Black Mountain Rag" Live at Sideshow Books

2011-06-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

To watch on YouTube, click the image. For Vimeo, see below.

Live From Sideshow Books, Los Angeles, June 2011.

© 2011 Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

"Deep Heaven" (with Rev. Raymond Branch)

2011-06-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

To watch on YouTube, click the image. For Vimeo, see below.

Reverend Raymond Branch and Josh Alan reunited! Together again in the pews of the Heavenly Rainbow Baptist Church, they improvise an acoustic gospel mashup on the spot, blending Doc Watson’s “Deep River Blues” with “I Wonder What They’re Doing in Heaven Today?” June 2011.

© 2011 Rev. Raymond Branch, Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

Rev. Branch's RAINBOW GOSPEL HOUR can be heard every Sunday morning at 3:00 am on KTYM, AM 1460 (streaming live via http://www.ktym.com/Sunday.htm )

Visit Rev. Branch here.

Josh Alan Friedman LIVE at Sideshow Books, Los Angeles!

2011-06-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

TONIGHT! JOSH ALAN FRIEDMAN returns to Los Angeles for a second and final evening of music and quality lit at Sideshow Books in West L.A. He'll be reading and signing his latest book, BLACK CRACKER, and playing a set of his famous atomic acoustic blues. Join us and paint the weekend BLACK!

Sideshow Books
11323 Idaho Ave
Los Angeles 90025
(310) 428-4631
Friday June 10, 8 pm

About Sideshow Books:

Used and Rare Books, Magazines, Original Art, with focus on Pulp Fiction, Crime, Art, Photography, Cinema, Music, Beat, Underground, Surfing, Esoterica, Erotica and Collectible Children's Books.

View Larger Map

Josh Alan Friedman LIVE at Alias Books East, Los Angeles!

2011-06-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

Writer/musician JOSH ALAN FRIEDMAN returns to Los Angeles for an evening of music and quality lit at Alias Books East in Atwater Village TONIGHT. He'll be reading and signing his latest book, BLACK CRACKER, and playing a set of his famous atomic acoustic blues. Join us and paint the weekend BLACK!

Alias Books East
3163 Glendale Boulevard
Los Angeles 90039
(323) 661-9000
Thursday June 10, 8 pm

About Alias Books East:

Alias Books East is an open shop located in the heart of Atwater Village at 3163 Glendale Blvd. We carry a wide variety of subjects with an emphasis on literature, film and the arts. We're always looking to buy books, collections, and whole libraries. For more information feel free to email us at aliasbookseast@gmail.com or call (323) 661-9000 during business hours. The store is open 7 days a week from 10am until 10pm.

View Larger Map

Josh Alan Comes to Los Angeles!

2011-06-03T02:22:00.000-07:00

Writer/musician JOSH ALAN FRIEDMAN returns to Los Angeles for two evenings ONLY of music and quality lit! Thursday, June 9 at 8pm he'll be at Alias Books East in Atwater Village, and Friday, June 10 at 8pm he'll be at Sideshow Books in West L.A. He'll be reading and signing his latest book, BLACK CRACKER, and playing a set of his famous atomic acoustic blues. Join us for both evenings and paint the weekend BLACK!

For details and driving directions to Alias Books East, click here.

For details and driving directions to Sideshow Books, click here.

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World

2011-05-23T00:02:00.000-07:00

Theater Review Dept.: The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World

Note to WFMU listeners and our crowd: I saw the second night preview of The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, an off-Broadway musical at Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater, on 42nd Street. It’s a total winner. Bringing my 11-year-old daughter, I was confronted by the task of explaining why American Idol is musically and spiritually poisonous, but The Shaggs' badness is beautiful. For instance, on their 1969 LP, the drums are so neatly out of sync that you nearly have to be a musician to appreciate it. (And thus, unlike Idol, The Shaggs cult is among the musically literate.)

photo credit: Joan Marcus

Philosophy has been workshopped for nine years, with earlier productions in Chicago and L.A. These days, musicals and their creators must be workshopped to death before they get a sliver of a chance for a mainstream breakthrough. This New York launch runs through June.

The Shaggs were the Ed Wood of girl groups, a band so innocently, sincerely “bad” that they inadvertently founded the category of outsider music. In the age of over-categorization, look in the “Other” bin. Defined by Irwin Chusid of WFMU, the outsider premise suggests that some cassette recording you might have surreptitiously made of your grandpa singing in the shower could become tomorrow’s Number One hit record.

Philosophy’s plot is driven by the Shaggs’ nutjob of a dad, Austin Wiggin, played by an all-too-convincing Peter Friedman (no relation). He was their unrelenting Ed Wood-like visionary. In the late sixties, he forced his three small-town New Hampshire daughters into a band that he envisioned would become his ticket out of a banal working-class hell. Well, their father was somewhat right. Only it’s slowly happening in the decades after he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1975.

The show makes ethereal use of the ascending “Twist & Shout” modulating harmonies to imply something otherworldly and spectacular was in the air. The anti-Beatles. In this case, the recording of an album that could vie for “worst” of all time. But of course, like Ed Wood films, it is not the worst, but rather something unique, singular and inspiring. Philosophy of the World, the album, was re-released in 1980 after being discovered by the band N.R.B.Q. Some descriptions over the years: “original, fearless art”; “a Dada masterpiece”; “mind-bendingly horrible” and “sufficient to disprove the philosophical structure of the modern world.”

It’s said the sisters were barely allowed to listen to any music growing up. So in fact, it is as if these teenage girls had to re-invent music. Then practice it for years, so that it took on its own untutored, yet highly structured teenage-girl style. You can’t fashion a musical using the actual Shaggs songs themselves, so the writers created a wholly original musical around their subject, quoting fragments of Shaggs material within the score. I counted two beautiful ballads, by Gunner Madsen and Joy Gregory. Ethereal performances by the girls, as Dot, Betty and Helen Wiggin.

Philosphy of the World is a splendid take on The Shaggs' odyssey. I hope the show forges eastward on 42nd Street.

(Playing through June 2011 at Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. in NY.)

I'm Workin': Josh Alan on the Road

2011-05-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

Boswell Book Company of Milwaukee welcomes Josh Alan and Black Cracker.

photo © 2011 Barbie Brennan Nelson

I'm Workin': Josh Alan on the Road

2011-05-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

Josh Alan heats up the ABP Benefit, Denton, TX.

photo © 2011 Adam Wood

Josh Alan Live in Texas, Saturday April 9!

2011-04-02T00:20:00.000-07:00

Josh Alan plays live in Texas on Saturday, April 9 at Dan's SilverLeaf in Denton. Headlining the ABP Benefit Ball for Aaron Bennett Presley, Josh's set is scheduled for 5:30 pm.

Also on the bill: Foolish 2, Save the Humans for Later, NEEKS, KaiN the EverymaN. Catering by Big Fatty's. Silent auction and proceeds to help defray cancer survivor ABP's extensive medical bills.

View Larger Map

On Nelson Algren

2011-03-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

Talk given at the 22nd Annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party at the St. Paul Cultural Center in Chicago, March 26, 2011.

Nelson Algren. Author of The Man With the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side, Somebody in Boots, The Neon Wilderness, The Last Carousel and Chicago: City on the Make

Sometimes I feel alone when I derive inspiration from Nelson Algren. I feel grateful, even relieved to have learned about this event. Nelson Algren has been my literary hero since I was a teenager. I love that there’s an Algren “hotline” phone number.

In July 1964—I was 8 years old—my father announced, in stentorian voice, to me and my two brothers: “Boys—a Great Writer is coming to stay with us.” So I wondered what a Great Writer would look like, how he might talk and dress, and how old you had to be to become such a person. It seemed like a statue was coming, some figure upon a horse.

It was Nelson Algren, of course, who my father, 34 at the time, looked upon no differently than he would have Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But my dad was friends with Algren, who’d written a couple of very good reviews of his first two books.

So one day, Nelson Algren arrived by boat to the summer house we rented in Fair Harbor on Fire Island, a thin slip of beach between Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. For reference, this was the summer that A Hard Day’s Night opened; it was also known as the Long Hot Summer of 1964 in the civil rights movement.

Algren was a salty middle-aged gent who carried a suitcase in one hand and an electric typewriter case in the other. Electric typewriters were new, and every morning throughout the next week, he was up at the crack of dawn, crackling at the keys of this futuristic typewriter. So he seemed like a guy at the cutting edge of technology. Little did I know. My father, a generation younger, had an old Corona.

Algren went apeshit over our elderly nanny, Mrs. Sullivan (the “Mrs. O’Leary” character in my new book, Black Cracker). She would break into a put-on Irish brogue to his delight. For years afterward, whenever Algren called my father and Mrs. Sullivan answered the phone, he’d chat with Mrs. Sullivan for an hour. Mario Puzo also spent a lot of time chatting up Mrs. Sullivan when she answered the phone. She was delighted that great writers were so taken with her blue-collar charm, and kept their personally inscribed books by her bedside.

Mrs. Sullivan (who tortured me for the first ten years, then became a grand old lady).

Another other thing I recall from that week with Nelson in the house: He advised us that the pot handles be turned inward on the stove, rather than sticking out where they could be knocked over. Simple wisdom from Nelson Algren, but something my family hadn’t considered. He drank a little. My parents were crazy about him, but I think he spent more quality time gabbing with Mrs. Sullivan.

Algren greatly approved of a few younger writers, like Terry Southern and my Dad, Bruce Jay Friedman. In print, he said he admired Bruce Jay because he “didn’t know what he was doing” and he was “dangerous.” Calling a writer dangerous is the ultimate compliment, at least in my family. He wanted Bruce Jay to adapt Never Come Morning for the stage, and this was before my dad had ever written a play.

In the 1960s, all kinds of anti-establishment, dangerous ideas took hold in the culture, and millions of people listened and jumped aboard. Not like now. Now, there is no underground, no anti-establishment, or if there is, nobody knows about it. America is a corporatocracy, a corporate-dominated culture, with MBA degrees, corporate architecture, corporate entertainment, and millions of unquestioning kids in lockstep.

And that is why Nelson Algren remains so precious. He is not just a writer, but a Guardian Literary Angel, a Symbol, a counterweight to the corporatocracy. In his last years, he emphasized this, and I quote: “Big Business Kills.” Well, maybe we need standardization and assembly lines to build automobiles, but the sphere of this domination seems so powerful and out-of-whack, it throws off the balance of life. “Big Business Kills.” Those words echo in every bank bailout, every Enron and Bernie Madoff scandal that rapes a million people, every soulless concrete and glass skyscraper that uglifies the skylines of American cities.

Unlike in the past few centuries, serious writers—unless they are writers of computer games—are relegated to the bottom of the culture. Novelists are among the few citizens who actually have something to say. But they can’t even command the audience of real estate developers—who are really destroyers, not developers. CEOs are today’s rock stars.

Since the year that Algren died, 1981, we have become an Ayn Rand country, not a Nelson Algren nation. Imagine how different things might be if Ronald Reagan’s favorite writer had been Nelson Algren—instead of Ayn Rand.

Toward the end of Nelson’s life, he told my dad that “no one is interested in me.” Irwin Shaw told my dad the same thing. I myself didn’t have enough clout, when Algren was still alive, to get a magazine that would allow me to interview him.

Instead, it took me at least eight years to write a book called Tales of Times Square. Eight years is the amount of time Algren said it took him to write a book. I later read one of Nelson’s last interviews in the 1970s, where he said if he were young now, he would be writing about and living in Times Square. In fact, several chapters of his last book, The Devil’s Stocking, took place there. So with 50,000 writers living in New York, and me being the only one who bothered to write about Times Square, I felt like I had received a posthumous endorsement from Nelson Algren—my hero.

He also wrote a piece in which he was the victim of a “dry hustle” scam in a Times Square bar. I imagined him walking around Times Square like Don Quixote. This wizened street wizard. But he was hit with a $30 bar tab—which is like $75 today—after he okayed a drink for the B-girl on the adjacent barstool. Refusing to pay, Algren called their bluff. The 250-pound bouncer told him, “Pops, you come around here again, I’m going to get another old man to whip your ass.”

And now, I’ll play a song of mine called “Thanksgiving at McDonald’s in Times Square,” in his honor.

To watch on YouTube instead, click here.

© 2011 Josh Alan Friedman

To purchase your digital copy of the original "Thanksgiving at McDonald's in Times Square" single, click here.

BLACK CRACKER in the Midwest!

2011-03-10T12:23:00.001-08:00

Josh Alan Friedman is bringing BLACK CRACKER to the Midwest in a big way, making four appearances in Illinois and Wisconsin this month. (Click on city names in for full details of each event, including maps and driving directions.)

Friday, March 25 he'll kick things off in Evanston, at Bookman's Alley. (7 pm; free admission)

Saturday, March 26 it's on to Chicago where he'll speak at the 22nd Annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party at the Wicker Park Arts Center. (Admission: $10 at the door, $7 for seniors and students with ID)

Monday, March 28 he'll be in Milwaukee for an evening at Boswell Book Company. (7 pm; free admission)

Tuesday, March 29 it's back to Chicago, where he says farewell with a bang at Quimby's Bookstore. (7 pm; free admission)

Josh Alan Friedman to honor Nelson Algren in Chicago March 26

2011-03-09T00:04:00.000-08:00

The Nelson Algren Committee has invited Josh Alan Friedman to speak at their annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party on Saturday, March 26. The event will be held at the Wicker Park Arts Center, 2215 W. North Avenue in Chicago's Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhood.

Festivities begin at 8 pm. Admission is $10 at the door, $7 for seniors and students with ID. Drink tickets are available to those wishing to toast Algren; complimentary snacks and door prize drawings add to the fun.

Full event details (and more on Algren) can be found on the Committee's website, here.

Algren's 1967 mugshot

View Larger Map

BLACK Tuesday in Chicago March 29!

2011-03-08T00:03:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, March 29 is Black Tuesday in Chicago as Josh Alan Friedman brings Black Cracker to Quimby's Bookstore! Join us for an evening of Quality Lit and atomic acoustic guitar starting at 7 pm.

Quimby's Bookstore is located at 1854 West North Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622

View Larger Map

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

BLACK Monday in Milwaukee March 28!

2011-03-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 28 is Black Monday in Milwaukee as Josh Alan Friedman brings Black Cracker to Boswell Book Company! Join us for an evening of Quality Lit and atomic acoustic guitar starting at 7 pm.

Boswell Book Company is located at 2559 N. Downer Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53211

View Larger Map

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

BLACK Friday in Evanston March 25!

2011-03-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

Friday, March 25 is Black Friday in Evanston as Josh Alan Friedman brings Black Cracker to Bookman's Alley! Join us for an evening of Quality Lit and atomic acoustic guitar starting at 7 pm.

Bookman's Alley is located at 1712 Sherman Ave., Evanston, IL 60201-3775

View Larger Map

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2011-02-28T00:02:00.000-08:00

From the editor's desk:

He's the unscrupulous realtor in Poltergeist, Sheldon the network exec on Larry Sanders, Uneeda Medical Supply's "Frank" in Return of the Living Dead (and graverobber "Ed" in Part II). And for those on the East Coast, the face and voice of Pathmark stores for decades. More? How about Broadway, television, Wall Street, Mulholland Dr. and Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster! Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. James Karen does the cover!

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2011 Wyatt Doyle

Len Lesser, 1922–2011

2011-02-17T19:41:00.000-08:00

From the editor's desk:

Received the sad news that the wonderfully prolific actor Len Lesser has passed away at the age of 88. Len graciously lent us his unforgettable face, and we're grateful to him.

Rest in peace, Len.

An overview of Mr. Lesser's credits from a truly remarkable career in film and television can be found here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2011-02-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

From the editor's desk:

Billy the CRACKER: The great Clu Gulager (The Tall Man, The Virginian (TV), The Last Picture Show, Return of the Living Dead) does the cover.

Read David Del Valle's extensive interview with Clu for Psychotronic here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2011 Wyatt Doyle

BLACK CRACKER Book Trailer

2011-01-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Black Cracker gets a book trailer.

Video by Wyatt Doyle

Music: "Shoe Shine Boy" by Josh Alan, from the album Famous & Poor; buy the CD here.

Up, You Mighty Race!

2011-01-17T10:34:00.000-08:00

A Special Martin Luther King Day Message from the makers of Black Cracker

I look to Black people to save America. They have collectively carried and suffered the burdens of this country more than any other group. America would not have risen without their forced labor for 280 years. King Cotton would not have built the South. America would be inconceivable, a drastically different entity, had their forced immigration not taken place. From the momentous moral conflicts of race, to the creation of jazz, blues, the pinnacles of sports achievement, the literature of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn to Iceberg Slim, from pancakes to peanut butter—America is a Negro nation.

And now, our future rests on Black America, as they continue to come into their own as never before. Put some rhythm into molecular biology and I suspect you will kick cancer’s ass. Put some soul into theoretical physics, and you might end up with a time machine, as envisioned by Dr. Ronald L. Mallett. Elect more Black district attorneys, and you might begin to reverse horrible injustices of false imprisonment—as championed by our own D.A. in Dallas, Craig “Do the Right Thing” Watkins.

When I see a Black businessman or lawyer, I expect him to be of higher ethics than a white one. This may be a ludicrous conceit, an upside down version of Jim Crow. Yet when I see a Black sushi chef, cardiologist or airline pilot, I assume he better be great.

Unfair? A new twist on reverse racism? Perhaps. We may have arrived on separate ships, but we’re all in the same boat now. However, in the same way Jackie Robinson demonstrated a new way to run bases, and Hendrix summoned lightning into guitars, I expect new levels of Black genius to emerge. President Obama is just the beginning.

More Black Presidents will follow, but this is just symbolic. This is not Nigeria, Ivory Coast or Liberia—this here is America. Everything hit them harder, en masse—the Depression, the Viet Nam War, floods, famine. The civil rights movement was followed by decades of self-inflicted pain and blame-gaming. Been there, done that. Now is the time for 30-million strong to flourish. The Great Black Hope is upon us like never before. They may have once shined the white man’s shoes, raised his chillun and picked up his garbage. Now it is up to them to figure out how to clean up the white man’s nuclear waste, oil spills and the even more toxic abuses of Capitalism. White people can’t do it. God won’t do it. It’s up to Black America. They will be our ironic saviors. I look to Black people to save America.

BLACK CRACKER in Chicago!

2011-01-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

Josh Alan brings Black Cracker to Chicago this March! For complete details and updates, watch this space...

"The Elevator Ride"

2010-12-13T00:02:00.000-08:00

Originally appeared in Blab! #8, Summer 1995

“Must be getting a little nippy out there,” announced Gus. His elevator car filled with ten elementary school kids, crowded past capacity. Gus was breathing heavy, huffing and puffing as usual. Not that this line of work required much physical effort. It was like being an astronaut; they didn’t need to drive their crafts, just vegetate inside. Gus was an elevator astronaut, perhaps, soaring, soaring through the 35-story heavens high above, driving his Otis car on its vertical route, o’er electrical cable and chain.

He closed the door and the golden gate, the kids squeezed in nice an’ snug. Gus was breathing heavy as he cranked the manual drive throttle, and some of the kids were giggling. He knew they were laughing at him again, because he breathed funny.

Suddenly, one of the high-pitched voices screamed, “Fuck the elevator man!” It sounded horrible to Gus, he’d heard it before. But he always remained stoic, having to open the gate and door for each little bastard.

“Fuck the elevator man!” shouted the prepubescent voice once more, too quick for Gus to see who it was when he turned around.

“The elevator man is your friend,” came one little girl, admonishing the group. “Be nice to him.” But Gus could hear the sarcasm in her voice. His breathing became worse. More giggling.

“Fuck the elevator man!” spat the little voice once again.

Then something broke inside of Gus.

“Fuck the elevator man?” said Gus, rhetorically, halting the elevator and whirling around. “Fuck the elevator man?” His lips contorted. “I’m a man, goddamnit! I have a wife and kid. I have a job. I go to woik every morning, and church every frickin’ Sunday.” And then his face flushed red. “But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let anybody fuck me. I may drive an elevator, but I’m a man. A man!”

There was death silence among the kids, clutching their schoolbooks to their chests. The smiles were wiped off their faces. Gus’s respiration became that of a dragon exhaling, building steam. The elevator was stopped somewhere between the 22nd and 23rd floors. He crooked his finger menacingly at the whole bunch.

“Now… Who’s gonna fuck me? Who’s gonna fuck the elevator man?”

There was no answer.

Gus grabbed the first boy in front of him by the scruff of the neck, and lifted him off the ground. Gus’s head twisted within an inch of the boy’s face, cockeyed. “I must be talking Japanese. I said, who’s gonna fuck the elevator man?” He dropped the boy. The rest of the kids cowered against the rear, managing a small clearing before Gus. They were sons and daughters of psychiatrists, ambassadors, rich kids and their friends.

“Howsa ’bout you? You wanna fuck me?” Gus demanded, his inflamed face staring down another 6th grader. “Which one-a-youse wants to fuck me, speak up? I’m a man, I still boff my wife, I do my woik.”

The kids saw Gus’s nostrils flare with every breath. The red blood vessels in his nose became inflamed and agitated. None of the paralyzed kids spoke up to rat out the culprit among them.

“I spent t’ree years inna 77th Infantry Division, I was honored after the goddamned war. Honored!”

Gus took the elevator back down to the lobby. He slammed open the gate and door. The prisoners were released, all of them sighing with relief. The loudmouth was not caught. Who knows what Gus might have done had he caught him. Fats the Doorman came to Gus’s elevator. He was a heavy breathing fellow, too.

“I ain’t takin’ any of these little bastards up anymore,” said Gus, between tears and rage. “One of ’em says he’s gonna fuck me.”

“All right, Gus, calm down, calm down.” Fats called for Chappy, in the A-B line, to leave his post and drive the school children up. Gus caught his breath, Fats patting him on the back, telling him to take it easy. The kids streamed back in the elevator.

And then Gus heard the prepubescent voice come at him again, as the elevator doors closed:

“Fuck the elevator man!”

© 1995, 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

A BLACK CRACKER Christmas!

2010-12-06T00:02:00.000-08:00

This holiday season, why not make it a Black Christmas for the crackers in your life? Signed copies of Josh's BLACK CRACKER are available NOW for immediate shipment! Click here to order.

You'll be in excellent company, as our Xmas book trailer attests...

click image above to view on YouTube, or below to watch on Vimeo

"Thanksgiving at McDonald's in Times Square"

2010-11-21T02:54:00.000-08:00

Josh Alan's first 45.

To purchase your digital copy of the original "Thanksgiving at McDonald's in Times Square" single, click here.

© 1988, 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

Video by Wyatt Doyle & Josh Alan Friedman, with artwork by Drew Friedman. Visit DrewFriedman.net

Josh plays "Thanksgiving" live here.

Hear Josh on Sirius Radio TODAY!

2010-11-15T00:03:00.000-08:00

Per Josh:

"Making my regular NY appearance on FreeWheelin' (Sirius Radio 147, or XM 171) Monday afternoon, starting at 12:15 EST. Our topic today: Girl Scouts."

Miss at your peril...

BLACK CRACKER Abroad

2010-11-15T00:02:00.000-08:00

From the editor's desk:

Black Cracker takes the Barcelona Metro.

photo © 2010 Sandee Curry

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

Dangerous Minds on BLACK CRACKER

2010-11-08T00:13:00.000-08:00

"Friedman combines his usual sardonic humor with a surprisingly sweet tone and the result is both very funny and touching. It also deals with race in America by hewing to real life details, avoiding broad sentiment and proselytizing. The truth is really in the telling."

Read the rest of Marc Campbell's Dangerous Minds review of Black Cracker here.

"Bela Lugosi" from THE WORST!

2010-10-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

From THE WORST! Josh Alan's original musical based on the life of Ed Wood.

THE WORST! is available on CD and digital download from CD Baby. Click here to purchase.

© 1994, 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

Video by Wyatt Doyle, with artwork by Drew Friedman (from WARTS AND ALL by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman). Visit DrewFriedman.net

CRACKER Talk: News & Reviews

2010-10-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

Here are nine posts on Black Cracker, the novel, of particular interest:

"In these peculiar times when "political correctness" fights it out with Ann Coulter, while the rest of us keep our heads down, try and pretend that none of it matters, and avoid the tough questions, I simply can not recommend this book highly enough."

— The Hound, The Hound Blog

"What Friedman offers the reader is more like a rich look at a vanished world that was vaporizing just as his memory recorded it."

— Gemini Spacecraft

"Friedman splits sides, breaks hearts and always remains ruthlessly honest about the real world, a place that doesn't conform to the politically correct wishes of liberals or conservatives."

— Michael Simmons, "White Like Me," L.A. Weekly

"Against the background of civil rights and the shifting mores of the decade Friedman dramatizes with cinematic relish not only his unique childhood but a cast of local characters (in all senses of the word) that has lived inside of him for decades."

— Joe Bonomo, "Coming of Age With Josh Alan Friedman," No Such Thing As Was

"I just finished reading Black Cracker. Wow, whew, and Holy Sh_t."

— Georgina Spelvin, Georgina's World

"It's the funniest thing I've ever read, bar none."

— J.D. King, Drawger

"He's the kind of guy whose books are so fucking good that I never have any on my shelves; I'm always giving them away!"

— King, Black Teeth and Busted Dreams

See also:

D Magazine

Luke Ford

...And click here to read ten 5-star reviews on Amazon.com.

Black Cracker is, of course, available NOW; signed copies are available here.

Black Student Demands, 1970

2010-10-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

Artifact from my high school in 1970 (long after Black Cracker):

(click to enlarge)

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-10-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Let 'er Rip! Mr. Taylor does the cover.

Visit the amazing Rip Taylor on his website here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

Josh Alan's "Thanksgiving at McDonald's..." in Los Angeles

2010-10-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

Live at Alias Books in West L.A., July 2010. Part of New Texture Nights.

To purchase your digital copy of the original "Thanksgiving at McDonald's in Times Square" single, click here.

© 2010 Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-10-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Bonzo CRACKER! The great Neil Innes—of The Rutles and Bonzo Dog Band—does the cover.

Visit Neil online here at the Innes Book of Records.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

Josh's Lost New York: Don Normal of 42nd St. (Part 2)

2010-10-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Once more into the archives for another visit with Don Normal...
(Part 1 can be found here)

Photos by the great Regent Sound engineer, Vince McGarry

© 2010 Josh Alan Friedman, Vince McGarry

Josh's piece on Don Normal, "The Human Being of 42nd Street," can be found in his collection When Sex Was Dirty.

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-09-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Uncle Cracker: the staggeringly prolific actor Len Lesser, Seinfeld's "Uncle Leo" (one of many "Uncles" in Mr. Lesser's filmography) does the cover.

An overview of Mr. Lesser's credits from a truly remarkable career in film and television can be found here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

Josh's Lost New York: Don Normal of 42nd St. (Part 1)

2010-09-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

A few folks, over the years, have requested more pictures of Don Normal. He lived on the 3rd to 7th floors of 115 W. 42nd Street, between Fun City Books and Holiday Hostesses, during the late 1970s. Several floors had caved in, from which Don was able to construct a cavernous habitat, complete with a full stage for our band to rehearse. We did a few gigs in the downtown punk clubs, a music scene I never related to.

He named the band Bitch, and then Don Normal and the Ear Regulars. The drummer, Don’s brother, looked exactly like Lurch of the Addams Family, if Lurch had been a midget. I remember quitting the band after Normal designed a space suit he wanted me to wear onstage. Similar requests were made of me through a succession of (what I refer to as) “Failure Rock” bands I played guitar for in the 1970s. Each provided a heartbreaking defeat in their quest for 1970s rock stardom.

Normal’s song, “Hot A Lot,” included here, actually had a good opening verse:

I’d like to say that
I like your shoes and
I like the way that they
Stick to the bottom of you

Don Normal was from a small town in Canada, where needless to say, he didn’t fit in. But he did fit in on 42nd Street, the only place where we both fit. Last I saw Don Normal, he was working at the Empire Diner on 9th Avenue in the early 1980s. I haven’t seen him since. So this is my message in a bottle—wishing him fond regards, wherever, if ever, he is.

Photos by the great Regent Sound engineer, Vince McGarry

© 2010 Josh Alan Friedman, Vince McGarry

Josh's piece on Don Normal, "The Human Being of 42nd Street," can be found in his collection When Sex Was Dirty.

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-09-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

The incomparable John Waters.

John Waters' latest book is Role Models; pick up a copy here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

Sent Away (Part 4)

2010-09-20T00:02:00.000-07:00

Technically, this is not a letter from someone who was “sent away”—unless summer camp counts as such. I’m running it because it’s one of two letters preserved from my girlfriend in 1970, when we were 14. I haven’t seen her since that time. A simply fantastic girl who resembled Joey Heatherton, one of the few shining memories of my teenage years. Web searches yield almost nothing, considering maiden names and the abyss of 40 years. But I heard at some point she lived in Atlanta.

(click pages to enlarge)

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-09-16T00:02:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Frank Black, aka Black Frank, aka Black Francis of the Pixies.

Visit Frank Black on his website here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

Sent Away (Part 3)

2010-09-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

Last week we ran a drug-fueled letter by a "sent away" friend, from 1971. Though I thought he gave permission initially, he freaked a bit when he actually saw his teenage self displayed online. So we pulled it down. But he consented to rerun it without his name.

The author of this letter holds a special status in the personal mythology of my teenage years. For starters, he is a hero for standing his ground against all those forces that once condemned comic books. Marvel helped him survive childhood, which he did just barely, considering the entire school system seemed as if it were constructed, by design, to fuck him up and keep him down.

His own father, in a futile attempt to rouse him awake for school, would contemptuously gather up armfuls of his son's prized Marvel Comics and dump them in the gutter. My friend would robotically get out of bed, retrieve and wipe off his comics from the gutter, then return to slumber under the covers. His internal clock was set to go off for 3pm each day—the moment the school bells rang to go home.

My friend was sent away in 1971. It was a last-ditch effort to get him to shape up and “hit the books,” as his father put it. But the only books he ever hit were comic books—with time out for The Three Stooges and keeping immaculate baseball score ledgers. Well, guess who had the last laugh. As he ripened into manhood, he became a pioneer and leader in the exploding rare comic book market. A Wall Street-worthy enterprise. Those same publications his father had thrown into the gutter were now worth untold thousands. In an ironic twist of ideology, his father actually became an investor in comics, scratching his head in bewilderment over million-dollar estate sales his son would broker.

But before all this, I received this letter from Vermont in 1971:

(click pages to enlarge)

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-09-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Ed Begley, Jr. does the cover.

Visit the inspirational Mr. Begley on his website here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-09-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Is the expression on the face of the young Cracker a response to the ever-gorgeous Pam Grier's timeless beauty, or her timeless badassitude?

Pick up a copy of Pam Grier's autobiography, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

Sent Away (Part 2)

2010-08-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

For me, entrance into 7th grade at Great Neck South Jr. High, in 1968, was a demoralizing, dehumanizing, soul-killing nightmare. There were almost a thousand kids per grade, each one a peon in this industrialized fascist institution. I collapsed in my room after the first day of school, facing a six-year prison sentence which I didn’t believe I could survive.

But, as I had discovered Bobo in first grade (see Black Cracker), after a few weeks, I made the acquaintance of Billy Bloom. Bloom was self-liberated from academic chores, breaking out in fits of existential laughter. I was the only other student who found this contagious. He molded a realistic clay figurine in art class. As with King Kong, showcasing genitalia was unacceptable. But Bloom molded on an enormous pecker, making it seem like an afterthought. Since the rest of the figure was done skillfully, in the style of Michelangelo’s David, the art teacher was perplexed as to whether to accept or destroy the sculpture. The teacher critiqued that it was excellent—but would Bloom, who kept a straight face throughout, perhaps consider making the offending protrusion a bit smaller. Which of course was Bloom’s whole point—to sculpt as big a dick as he could get away with.

Bloom and I were often reprimanded to the assistant principal for laughing. Biting our tongues before Mr. Lipari’s desk, the harder we tried to remain silent, the more the laughs would swell until we literally collapsed to the floor in hysterics, while Lipari called our mothers to have us suspended. At that point, our school careers, and thus our lives, were fucked, so we had nothing more to lose. Amazingly, the gym coach was the only faculty member to beat us up. But Billy Bloom kept me sane that year.

Before the start of 8th grade, Bloom was sent away. Every few weeks, I eagerly anticipated another envelope from Vermont. Vermont seemed to be the preferred destination for disturbed white teenagers from Long Island. His letters were like Zap comics, before Zap was even available. I planned to write comic strips for him to illustrate whenever he returned. When he finally emerged about two years later, he turned serene. As if he had been defanged, emasculated or lobotomized. He stopped drawing and doing schtick. Frustrated by mental images I couldn’t draw myself, I eventually opted to collaborate with my second choice—my younger brother, Drew. Yet I still wonder at what might have been, had Billy Bloom remained a lunatic.

From some tranquil Vermont facility for boys, in 1969:

click letters to enlarge

CRACKER Inspiration

2010-08-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

from the editor's desk:

Spotted by New Texture's eagle-eyed Victoria Doyle—on the sidewalk in front of the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA), no less!

Street portraitist Sharon Artist displays her wares. There's Liza of course, Stevie Wonder, some animal portraiture, "actor/coach" Paul Rubio (??) and...who's that? Could it be...?

Indeed it is! Sharon's interpretation of the Black Cracker cover!

Los Angeles, ladies and gentlemen.

photos © 2010 Victoria Doyle

Sent Away (Part 1)

2010-08-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

Every close friend I ever had throughout childhood (with the one exception of David Rosenberg) was at some point “sent away.” Meaning reform school, juvenile lockup, a mental institution or facility for wayward boys. I’m talking about a dozen or more of my best friends, from the entire 12-year prison sentence called school. Does this reflect something about me? I was never actually sent away myself, but there were some close calls. In some cases, I was crushed, losing a best friend who I would never see again. Like Joey V in fifth grade, a psychotic pyromaniac and arsonist. A male twin of The Bad Seed, I’m now most grateful he was sent somewhere for the criminally insane. But at the time I enjoyed his friendship immensely.

On the sweeter side were the Stember Brothers, Allan and Steven, both adopted by a World War II vet and his WAC wife. Both parents remained steadfast 1940s Americans, unable to yield to late ’60s youth culture. Their sons were hippies to the hilt. I haven’t had contact with either since 1972. Neither turn up anywhere in web searches, so I don’t know if they are dead or alive.

In the coming weeks, I will scan childhood letters from mental institutions, notes from girls in 1960s schoolrooms, and this, from Steven Stember in 1970:

click to enlarge

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-08-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

Hef's got his...

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel is in theaters.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

"Step by Step" (w/Rev. Raymond Branch)

2010-08-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

To view on YouTube, click the above image. To watch on Vimeo, see below.

Josh Alan and the Reverend Raymond Branch improvise a new arrangement of "Step by Step" in the pews of the Heavenly Rainbow Baptist Church. (July 2010, Inglewood, CA)

Visit Reverend Branch online here.

© 2010 Rev. Raymond Branch, Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

WANTED! More Readers Like...

2010-08-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the editor's desk:

The unstoppable Ernest Borgnine does the cover.

Mr. Borgnine's book, Ernie: The Autobiography, is a great read; pick up a copy here.

Black Cracker is available NOW; signed copies are available here.

photo © 2010 Wyatt Doyle

Paul Stone's TALES OF TIMES SQUARE

2010-08-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

Here is a 26-minute bloc of footage from Paul Stone's unfinished Tales of Times Square movie. It's his very own vision, certainly different from the book. I like the Al Kronish character most.
--Josh

Click on the poster image to watch the film on Vimeo

Visit the film's website here: www.TalesOfTimesSquare.com

"Assoc. Ed. Cites Anti-Sem in Stooges Censure at PIX"

2010-08-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

From Screw, Dec. 15, 1980, #615:

cover art by John Mariano

(click to enlarge)

Josh Alan's "Crossroads," Live in Los Angeles

2010-07-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

Jimmie Vaughan's Got No Blues At All

2010-07-19T00:02:00.000-07:00

from the Dallas Observer, July 8, 2010:

Jimmie Vaughan is the blues guitarist who reinvented "less is more." On his website bio, younger brother Stevie is quoted as saying, "I play probably 80 [percent] of what I can play. Jimmie plays one percent of what he knows. He can play anything."

This may be a terrible question to ask a lifelong bluesman, but why only blues?

"I play blues and rock 'n' roll," he responds. "People call it different stuff. I just play what I like, what I want to hear myself."

The most profound original track of Vaughan's later career is "Six Strings Down" (that, and "Boom-Bapa-Boom"). Its refrain, "Heaven done called another blues stringer back home," from his 1995 album, Strange Pleasure, is a gospel eulogy to his lost brother, who people love even more as time marches on. But for Vaughan, like most blues musicians, the future is mainly about the glorious past.

"I listen to jazz records from 1959," he says. "You can't have jazz without the blues; they're all connected. Gene Ammons and Willis Jackson, that's who I like. I listen to old gypsy records, flamenco, Sabicas, Nino Ricardo. I listen to Segovia—don't try to play like that, but it inspires me. I also like country music—George Jones, Webb Pierce."

Personally, I'd like to hear Vaughan stretch out and do a doo-wop album, a gospel album along the lines of "Six Strings Down" or a country album of some kind. Take some bigger chances. But that's a selfish, unfair request. You can't argue with his own refrain: "I just don't feel 'country.' I play what I like."

Approaching 59, Vaughan still looks like a movie star, with a perfect black hairline, "a longtime avatar of retro cool." He has always dressed as a blues dignitary, right down to the way that fine fabric hangs down over his boot heels. No one dressed like that since the heyday of Chess Records in Chicago in the 1950s—until the Fabulous Thunderbirds brought the style back at the tail end of the 1970s. Since then, it has become the standard wardrobe for a thousand blues bands. Originally, it was the way former sharecroppers "dressed up the blues," so they wouldn't be thought of as raggedy winos.

So here comes a fourth CD under his name, Jimmie Vaughan Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites, on Shout Factory, out this very week. Again, Vaughan is peerless in his taste and hasn't played a wrong note in 40 years. The album has lots of space and air between the instruments. It's dry, with little reverb, even on vocals, and has a short blues "conversation" with Lou Ann Barton. A Texas-shufflin' rhythm section with horns, cherry-picked from the Antone's fraternity—Austin-based musicians who let few into their tight professional clique. Except, of course, the members of Vaughan's touring band, which includes Providence-based Doug James. James is the best baritone sax player and arranger in the business.

A few years ago, Vaughan signed on to do a book with David Ritz, autobiographical collaborator of the R&B pioneers. But then he decided he didn't want to spill it. Or maybe his memories are just like his playing—heavy on groove and tone, but with dignified restraint. Why contribute to the endless junk heap of celebrity biographies? There are virtues to privacy, and you won't find him on Twitter.

"I just worked on it a little while," he says. "Didn't want to do it anymore. That's not what I do, is it? It's not that I have a bad or particularly weird or dark life. I mean, how would you like to have a book revealing everything about you?"

Actually, there have been a few. But Vaughan sums up his present as such: "I'm happily married. I've got twins. I really enjoy being with my family, playing guitar all the time, driving around in [classic custom] cars. I have a good life."

He's built five cars over the last 30 years. It takes at least five years for him to build one.

"It's not like transportation," he says. "It's art you can drive to the store. You nickel-and-dime it as you go along. They never get finished."

But Vaughan himself is working toward a happy ending.

"In the '80s," he says, "I was completely wild and out of my mind, running around the country. I'm not the same guy I used to be."

So now he'll raise his kids in Austin, and stay there, "unless they run me out of town."

Texas knighthood would be more likely.

"Thank goodness we don't have that," he says, democratically.

Well, we don't have knighthoods here, like they do in the land of King Arthur (Sir Mick, Dame Elton). But we do erect statues to musicians we've lost in air disasters—like Buddy Holly in Lubbock, and Jimmie's brother, Stevie, in Austin. There's plenty room in Texas for a few more, and I say put one honoring Jimmie Vaughan up now, in the State Capitol. (He already has Fender and Gretsch guitars named after him, and probably a car or two.) They should put up statues for the other founding Thunderbirds too, especially Keith Ferguson, and even one for drummer Mike Buck. Hell, they should rename Austin-Bergstrom International Airport for Keith Ferguson to make up for all the hell they gave him passing through customs, so that he finally couldn't tour outside of Texas. I'm going to start calling it Ferguson Airport from now on, until it catches on. And put up a statue of Lou Ann Barton while they're at it, somewhere near the Capitol.

There's plenty of reason: The Fab T-Birds spearheaded a blues revival 35 years ago that may only recently have started to wane. It's been debated as to whether blues is in some kind of a slump, like it was in the 1970s before the T-Birds. Most blues musicians are barely working, but then again, so goes the whole economy. If it is in a slump, Vaughan, with his robust touring schedule, is not aware of it.

"I totally ignore the whole music business," he says. "I don't even care what they do. If somebody puts out a record I like or I get excited about a musician, that's an exception."

Ignoring the music business concurs with every serious musician or person who loves music, for the past 30 years. But they do savor their Grammy nominations when they get them, and keep an eye on concert grosses in Pollstar.

Although we live in a space-time continuum that may be of one mind, Jimmie Vaughan might be considered a third-generation bluesman. He is now at the age that Muddy Waters or Gatemouth Brown, the second generation of blues icons, were when he first saw them during his youth in Dallas, or when he played with them at Antone's in Austin.

How might his life and career parallel with Muddy, Gatemouth or John Lee Hooker now that he's the same age they were then?

"Like Pee Wee Crayton said, 'We better get the gettin' while the gettin's good,'" he says. "I was fortunate enough to be on the tail end of that stuff, was able to see a lotta people play in Dallas that I hold up high. But they're still alive in my world."

Vaughan has no fear of having to face down the Disney channel and its attendant music: "My kids don't watch TV. We just keep it off." But inevitably, Vaughan's young kids may listen to Disney radio or something that clashes with everything he holds sacred about music. Then what?

"They have little guitars and they're starting to ask questions," he says. "I play all the time and if I get too loud, they go in the other room and close the door. If they ever want lessons, I would love to teach them."

Almost like a mantra these days, Jimmie Vaughan repeats that he loves the life he lives and he lives the life he loves. He supports Ron Paul, and posts the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights on his website.

"When you get older, you start appreciating things," he says. "I'm a fan of the Constitution. I started reading about our country and remembered one old-lady school teacher in Dallas reading us The Bill of Rights. It made me feel good. I was proud. I enjoy freedom. I like liberty."

© 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

"Feel the Spirit (Blues)" (w/ Rev. Raymond Branch)

2010-07-12T00:02:00.000-07:00

Josh Alan and the Reverend Raymond Branch "put some church words on it" in the pews of the Heavenly Rainbow Baptist Church. (July 2010, Inglewood, CA)

Visit Reverend Branch online here.

© 2010 Rev. Raymond Branch, Josh Alan, Wyatt Doyle

"In Search of Nan"

2010-07-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

J.D. Salinger’s total rejection of the vulgarity, banality and dog-eat-dog commerce of American culture was legend. Heroically, he refused to sell the film rights to Catcher in the Rye. Reporters staked him out for decades, only to have doors slammed in their faces, filing stories that became a genre in itself—that of not getting the first Salinger interview.

But what if the reclusive literary giant had finally emerged, but only to appear on some wretched game show, like Beat the Clock or Wink Martindale’s Tic-Tac-Dough? And what if he went apeshit over some porn bimbo?

Such was the premise of a short story attempt of mine, in Oui of Jan 1984. Little did I know—and was stunned to read in Salinger’s 2010 obit—that this nearly happened. Salinger had become infatuated with and pursued Elaine Joyce (a terrific B’way actress in her youth, now married to Neil Simon)—at that time host of The All-New Dating Game, and panelist on Match Game and I’ve Got a Secret. (And no matter how low-rent the strokebook mags were—see below—the hustlers who worked for them were still more honorable than the slime at mainstream media. And that’s no lie.)

Is that A Perfect Day for Bananafish in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?
J.D. Salinger pursuing Elaine Joyce, host of The All-New Dating Game.

Reprinted from Oui, Jan. 1984, in slightly altered form.

Nothing ticked off Ratsy Gold more than a terse refusal from some hack writer to appear in his magazine—though when such a flat No came from literary titan T.C. Gablinger to Ratsy’s desk, it fired him with the thrill of victory. People had stopped even trying to solicit output from the old man of letters years ago, because T.C. had never bothered to answer requests, much less refuse one—until now.

T.C. Gablinger, nearly 80, was known in his day as a sporting chap until he vanished into bitter seclusion after a brush with Hollywood. He published his swan song in 1958 (a sexual masterpiece), picked up a Nobel Prize and granted his final interview to Paris Match. Gablinger’s works had awakened the angst of an entire generation. But more legendary than his novels was his refusal to give interviews, answer his front door, and particularly his utter steadfastness in not releasing one written word, not with a cannon to his head. You might say he’d become more renowned for not writing. Yet Ratsy Gold, proud editor of Spud Plunker (“The mag of honest, loving sexuality”), examined the scrawled T.C. Gablinger rejection under his very nostrils. The first written word seen from the author since 1958. On a lark, Ratsy had dashed off an inquiry upon Spud letterhead requesting some new work. Or any “old, shitty ms. lying around.”

“No!” read Gablinger’s note.

“A Page Six in the Post,” Ratsy swore to his wide-eyed staff.

Ratsy Gold was considered by some a third-rate editor who couldn’t hold a job at any other magazine, giving the old shuck and jive to every model, writer and photographer who came to collect their due. Worse were his editorial skills with respect to language fundamentals, which couldn’t get him through a ghetto high school. “Let’s be hip, controversial,” he intoned to his staff, beaming at the thought. He was a freeloader who drove the company car, received free tickets, records and books with the promise of a Spud write-up, and wangled free dinners and women in similar fashion. Ratsy went unshaven for weeks on end, his hair tangled to the shoulder, wore T-shirts with trendy slogans (“A Million Dead Cops”), and was always on the roam for a free bar tab and long tits that resembled rippled water balloons, his favorites. He was a pear-shaped Romeo whose chief hangout was Big Wang’s in Chinatown. All the waiters there called him “Chee-chee” (penis in Mandaran vernacular). Give him a big-titted waitress and a bite off someone else’s dinner plate, he was in heaven.

Ratsy could also rip off a bar’s length of starving playwrights for stroke letters in the front of the mag. “Give me a JAP being gang raped by A-rabs up the ass while forced to watch the destruction of Tel Aviv from her hotel window,” he would bark, bouncing checks behind them. Ratsy also had a fondness for yarns concerning “oily blue Negroes” who came across white girls camping out in the woods, whom they would perform gross acts upon, then dismember. All of this in good humor, of course. “Stick in one of those oily blue Negroes,” he would whine contemptuously, to punch up stories.

Ratsy was foremost a champion deal maker, having penned six top-budget porn flicks. He was a brilliant schmoozer, to whom connections were sacred things. He was Editor-in-Chief of Spud Plunker.

After the amazing rejection arrived, the Rat, still glowing after a lunchtime schmooze with owner Irv of the Carny Deli, presented the document to Spud’s disbelieving staff.

“Does this count as new writing by Gablinger? Can we offer $500 to publish it?” Spud’s V.P. of finance, a six-footer named Gertel, protected the mag’s bankroll as though it were harbored in the canyon between her aging silicone marvels. Few dared for their life to reach in there.

“Over my dead body,” she gasped. Spud had never offered $500 for anything. Aside from her business acumen, Gertel ever so gently assisted in photo sessions of first-time models, posing them in “romantic positions.” Afterward, she would berate them mercilessly, calling them “disgusting sickos” for what they had done.

A letter postmarked from the same upstate town as Gablinger’s arrived the next day, in a shaky old man’s hand: “How about Nancy Shooter?” it read. “Co-starred with Johnny Wadd in Limo Girls. Fix me up with this angel and my next book will be delivered for installment in your publication. To be completed next month after 25 years of hell.”

Now, Ratsy Gold couldn’t give a rat’s ass for books or subjects beyond the oily blue rape genre, but he smelled history with a capital H. “I think he’s finally hit his home run,” said Ratsy to his staff. The letter, clearly the scrawl of a loon, contained no signature, but a quick handwriting analysis against an editorial colleague’s autographed copy of Death’s Innuendo proved it was T. C. Gablinger. Furthermore, embossed upon the stationery was the inscription “Hog on the Hudson,” which was known to be Gablinger’s houseboat hideaway, moored far up river all year round; it was never known to sail.

Publication of a new book by T.C. would create small international headlines; his decision to debut it in the pages of Spud Plunker would not only increase their print run into the millions, but Ratsy was sure to further his own personal splendor, perchance someday getting to deliver the mayor of New York to Big Wang’s in Chinatown for a photo op, inspiring a hundred free meals of gratitude from Wang himself. Big Wang’s brother and arch competitor, Little Wang across the street, already had a photo of the mayor dining there.

“Sounds like he’s hit the literary long ball,” said Ratsy, on the phone with agents all day. Surely there was some way to parlay the Spud installments into a subsidiary fortune. But no one believed it. The best response was hesitative, and even Page Six was reluctant to give credence to such a rumor. Nancy Shooter, on the other hand, was merely some porn bimbo, almost certainly used up in the biz by now, probably strung out on junk. Ratsy had met her three years ago on the set of “Two Nuns and a Donkey,” a 15-minute loop. Nevertheless, he dashed off the following on Spud letterhead:

“So, you go for Nan Shooter, eh? Promptly went through my Nan Shooter files and discovered the following two photo spreads, one from Snatch, Paps & ’Hind End mag (a disgrace to humanity), and the other, a hard-core book in which we also find our Nan in several foul and compromising activities. Hope this doesn’t rot your sweet tooth for Nan Shooter!”

This, the Rat figured, bumbling past any semblance of tact toward the Nobel Laureate, would really get him hot. Pix of the blonde actress when she was just over jailbait, each hole engulfed by oversized syphilitic dongs. These shots would have to hold Gablinger until the Rat could track down his gal, whose whereabouts he said in the note, he put a tracer on.

“And don’t worry,” continued the letter, “ol’ porn detective Ratsy here’ll have little Nan high on the Hog with you in no time. Name your photo, Ratsy tracks ’er down—though don’t hoist your sails yet. Meanwhile, how about the first chapter?”

It was two weeks before another feeble-pressured letter arrived to the Spud Plunker mailroom. There wasn’t a rat’s doubt in the Rat’s mind that the great T.C. Gablinger was about to emerge once again on the American literary landscape. It was “the last carnal love for a woman I will ever know,” he ranted, having fallen for her over his video machine, and he was sure he could conclude his book with her muse-like presence. It was now T.C.’s wish to assist in the hunt for Nancy Shooter, at least in spirit, with a suggestion: Had Ratsy checked with the photographers of both porn spreads? The fact was, he had. One lensman was dead, and the other spread was sold to Snatch, Paps & ’Hind End from a model agency, Twin Talent, in San Francisco, which didn’t recall the whereabouts of Miss Shooter since she stormed off a rainbow shower photo shoot, drenched in vomit, proclaiming she had “a classy image to protect.”

Wanting to hang on to the Biggest Book of the Decade for Spud, Ratsy waited for nightfall to plot his course at Big Wang’s crowded bar. “Always think better at crowded bars,” Ratsy advised his admiring staff. “The noise forces you to concentrate harder in order to block it out.” He dashed off the following:

“Making some progress in pursuit of the Nan. Seems she was off on some Third World porno tour, lead by Fran Trinkle last summer—photographed by that nomadic Love magazine group of folk pornographers. Seems our Nan contracted gastrointestinal diarrhea two days into Nigeria, and was whisked away in the vigilant care of some displaced American percussionists—ones who’ve become “Africanized,” found their roots in Black Classical Music. Thelonius Monkists, I think they’re called, terribly militant and oily blue. All this according to Miss Trinkle. Although La Trinkle sometimes suffers episodes of amphetamine psychosis. But no matter. Ol’ Det. Ratsy always gets his gal. Ace Spud reporters are also on the case. We’ll have lil’ Nan Shooter back in no time. . . though best not bank any spud on it just yet. (Would you consider Candy Pop or Trish Blacquelord instead?) How about those chapters?”

Gablinger’s next correspondence expressed a willingness to travel to Africa, gullible old genius that he was. Now truth be told, Ratsy couldn’t give a flying rat’s ass about the whereabouts of Miss Nancy Shooter. But he worshipped celebrityhood, which T.C. had in spades. Ratsy might finally collect his due in the Quality Lit world with this literary coup. His bewildered underlings at the mag were not quite connected enough to solicit useful information. For they knew it was the Rat, and only the Rat, who could come through with such privileged address. Yet all his leads fell short, directing him, via Spud correspondence, to San Diego housewives and cosmetics saleswomen, all with porn skeletons in the closet.

Obsessed with debuting T.C.’s comeback in the pages of Spud Plunker, while smashed on coke before his TV one night, Ratsy pondered sending the literary giant a one-way ticket to Lagos, Nigeria, in exchange for the book.

It was then that the very image of Nancy Shooter came over his screen—a model presenting a microwave someone had won on Cheat the Clock. This lookalike could surely fake out an old cadaver like T.C. She may have possessed a few more years and wrinkles than Nancy Shooter. But she fawned over kitchen appliances with the same ill-disguised contempt Nancy had shown for the largest peckers on screen. But then Ratsy stiffened in his shit-stained, baggy-assed boxers, hair a-frazzle, sleep-squinted eyes starting to widen.

It was the Nan!

Gablinger received the following telegram next morning:

“Hallelujah! Located our gal, back from Nigeria in good health. Says she’s ‘quit the life’ and gone legit, modeling toasters and luggage prizes on Cheat the Clock. Careful scrutiny reveals her ID as former Nan Shooter! But she’ll only boff Wink Hopperdale, the host. Best shot at stealing her from The Wink would be to make appearance on show. Each week, Cheat the Clock presents a celebrity guest, a $400 gig. Send book, prepare for show, and the fab Shooter snatch is yours. (Can you still plunk your spud?)”

Ratsy spent all day on the phone, pooling together his every TV resource, and then some. Spud Plunker had no media credibility whatsoever, but Ratsy himself had bounced around the dailies, leaving a marker here and there, which he called in. There wasn’t a connection left unturned in his Rolodex, and it took some doing before the straight press indeed speculated that T.C. Gablinger was about to surface for the first time in 25 years, perhaps even with a book. The tie-in with Cheat the Clock baffled some literary circles, but the show’s producers were delighted to have T.C. aboard. Ratsy, in his finest moment, acted as middleman, collecting 10 percent of T.C.’s $400. Maybe now they’d even honor the Rat by naming a sandwich after him at the Carny Deli, his most impassioned secret dream.

Wink Hopperdale, though a bit of a joke even amongst game show hoi polloi, was of the highest celebrity in hometown Kentucky, where he owned two Wink Hopperdale restaurants. He had once been a judge in the Miss America Pageant, and the local legislature debated renaming a boulevard after him, but decided not. El Winko, at 47, sported a Joseph Paris hairpiece and a freshly pressed tux for each segment. Though it seemed today, Wink was changing his shorts faster than his wardrobe could muster. It was to be one hot episode of Cheat the Clock!

Ratsy arrived at the morning press conference with a folksy smile and a cigar. “Am I a celebrity yet?” he wondered aloud, stumbling upon the dais to field reporters’ questions. There in the bleachers of Studio 17 was a buzzing audience of reporters, academics and Gablinger fans, some of them renowned men of letters themselves. Old English professors from New England, who’d flown in for the event, clutched tattered copies of Danny and Louie, Ten Fables and other Gablinger classics. Pressing on their minds was whether the Nobel Laureate would appear before the group for questioning. Ratsy apologized that T.C. wouldn’t, considering he was a budding octogenarian, and that he was off posing for the New York Post’s “Wingo” contest page.

“What does it all mean?” shot one of the Ivy League professors, followed by a colleague’s estimation that T.C. was driven into seclusion by the curse of the Nobel, and now chose to make some sort of statement by appearing in a vehicle representing the lowest common denominator of public vulgarity—a game show. “With this I can empathize,” he ventured. “But even so. . . why Cheat the Clock?”

“Have a T-shirt,” insisted Ratsy, the ever-dedicated editor-in-chief, handing out I’m a Spud Plunker! tops to the media at large. Representatives of The New Yorker were present, resentful that Spud Plunker was in the running over their own publication, where Gablinger had traditionally debuted his work. And a producer from Love Boat was there, hoping to wrangle Gablinger for a guest appearance. Wink was rather cranked up himself, trying to preserve the show’s meager dignity after wetting his trou.

“Will Gablinger abide by the rules?” shot some TV scribe. Wink was adamant that Cheat the Clock would be played in its purest, unadulterated form. The mere fact that T.C. was to appear in a slot usually occupied by down-on-their-luck lounge acts like Morty Gunty, Slappy White or Larry Storch was no reason to suspect otherwise.

Ratsy met the arrival of T.C. Gablinger backstage. The author was an old sea dog with wild, white hair and dry, parched lips. “Where is she?” he gasped, carrying a portable typewriter and a briefcase with him, which he said he’d hand over after things were squared with the Nan.

“She’s practically yours,” the Rat assured T.C., whisking him off into makeup, where two graduates of the Wilfred Academy of Beauty tried to cover a foul-looking conjunctivitis seeping from the old man’s eye.

A half-hour later, T.C. Gablinger emerged for his first public appearance in decades, the celebrity sub-host of Cheat the Clock. The Rat, waiting to be a contestant himself in the second half, with hopes of getting laid off of it, cheered him on from a side box. Ol’ T.C. looked to be a darn good prospect. He stood behind a podium with two fat housewives from Queens. El Winko had a morbid habit of threatening each female contestant with his cheek, which custom had them kiss. After this formality and a reflective pause to introduce the guest star (“What can I say, it’s an honor to have him, he needs no introduction”), Wink thrust his cheek menacingly toward Gablinger’s face. There seemed a deathly silence in the audience as T.C.’s twitching lips actually accepted the cheek with a bird-like peck. Wink Hopperdale then enthused, “Let’s cheat the clock, shall we!”

The ladies answered questions in the first category, Teenage Skin Problems. It was required that T.C. take a little hop around the game board in a potato sack, which the literary giant proceeded to do without a hitch. But T.C. really came to life in the bean bag toss, a healthy, old-salt shine coming over his face. Local news cameras whirred and the academic community seemed to be holding its peace commendably, albeit in a cold sweat. The fat housewives, finished at halftime, had with T.C.’s help won a year’s supply of baked clam breading.

At halftime, Ratsy weaseled his way into the models’ dressing room with his handy Daily News all-access press card, good for passing police barriers. Ratsy, whose wide, schmoozy smile always caught the gaze of women before his girth could get in the way, shot out with a resounding “Nancy, baby!” There stood the all-American porn starlet with the angelic face and the blonde curls, the only women to have deep-throated Johnny Wadd to the last inch, scrotum and all.

“Okay,” said the Rat, “let’s throw straight dice here, Nancy. T.C.’s next book is the hottest property in the world, and he’s willing to lay it on us over at Spud—if, that is, you’ll unretire some of that porn star pussy for a few hours.” He pulled out five crisp hundreds, the acquisition of which had been like obtaining blood from Gertel.

“I only fuck for love,” said the starlet, landing her eyes momentarily on the Rat’s black, baggy-jeaned crotch. Ratsy spied the dressing room for traces of soiled underthings he could slip in his pocket.

“What’s one more boff, after all those loops?” begged Ratsy. “He just surfaced from 25 years hiding underground.”

“Underground, schmunderground,” said the starlet. “I’ve got two kids, a house in Scarsdale. My husband would punch you out—”

“Just let him smell it!” Ratsy cried. “I need that book.”

“Ivory Soap wants me, goddamnit,” said Nancy. Then she reached for the bills.

In the second half of the show, Ratsy found himself behind the podium with an annoying red-haired male contestant whose face widened into an obscene grin whenever their eyes met. It was the Rat’s first TV exposure; he knew the eyes of Western Civilization were tuned into this historic broadcast of Cheat the Clock. Wink Hopperdale emerged to welcome both new players, then wave open Curtain Number One, which rose to the accompaniment of saccharine strings and a rapid-fire voiceover:

“Well, Wink, what do we have here? Why, it’s the long-awaited novel by T.C. Gablinger, coming down the stretch after decades of toil!”

Ratsy bolted upright in his seat, eyes focused upon ol’ T.C. banging away at his typewriter, a stack of finished pages on one side and Nancy on the other, striking perfect bimbo model poses, arm outstretched to present the grand prize.

“The Nobel Prize winner abdicates full North American serial and royalty rights for No!, a new book detailing the author’s day-to-day activities, like swabbing the deck, the mechanics of preparing toast, the permutations of solitary sex on the Hudson River. Yes, a fortune’s to be made for the next winner, who takes full legal possession of the work. The reader’s choice, more households prefer Gablinger. But don’t let that fool you, Wink, this prize contains more than a mere journal of senility—included is a carton of Rootin’ Tootin’ Root Beer.”

Gablinger, racing to cheat the clock, whipped the last page out of the typewriter simultaneously with the announcer’s finish, wiping his old brow with a well-earned “Whew!” The Nan reclined in a lounge chair, sipping root beer, pretending to enjoy the finished manuscript. Ratsy’s grinning, red-haired opponent quickly introduced himself.

“Lou Zucker, Spuzz Hole magazine,” he whispered, extending a hand. “The Gablinger book’s mine.” Ratsy instantly remembered Zucker as a Shakespearean scholar who became editor of the dreaded vagina publication so fiercely edging out Spud Plunker on newsstands.

“Gentlemen, you know the rules,” said El Winko. “The category: Shakespearean Sonnets. Let’s proceed to cheat the clock!”

© 1984, 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

Why the Miss America Pageant Should Be Abolished

2010-06-27T00:02:00.000-07:00

Originally appeared in High Times, Jan. 1983

At the Greyhound Gate to Atlantic City, three ticket-holding blind persons were swiftly refused entry by the bus driver. The seats were oversold; the door pumped shut and off he drove. One of them began to cry because she had been separated from a blind companion already on the bus. The two others were shaken up, their dreams of attending Miss America pretty much shattered. A dozen last-minute beauty-pageant freaks stood cursing on the Greyhound ticket line at Port Authority New York, in a desperate attempt to make the show. It was the final night of the 1982 Miss America Pageant.

I was able to make a 5:30 New Jersey Transit bus, hoping to land an interview with the First Runner-Up on the morning after. Who cared about Miss America? The First Runner-Up was a hotter subject; she’d be neglected, bitter, dying for an interview, suffering from the pain of the greatest almost in her life. She wouldn’t get her face on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or see herself in Nestle ads. But what were the functions of First Runner-Up? Was she sort of the vice-president, ready to jump in should Miss America get impeached or assassinated? Furthermore, I’d get to blurt out great questions, like, “Do you believe in premarital sex?”

During the three-hour journey, we passed through eight toll booths, which many folks can’t afford on the way back. At the outskirts of Atlantic City was a mile-long stretch of makeshift parking lot, filled to capacity on the climactic night of the seven-day pageant. From the bus depot, I made a beeline to the stadium-sized Convention Center, adjacent to the Playboy Hotel. Only four contestants were put up at the Playboy, the least of any hotel. The other 46 girls were divvied up by the remaining eight casinos, who boasted their pictures in the lobbies.

Swarming over the boardwalk was a Halloween-like procession of Miss America freaks—clean-cut families with little girls decked out in Jr. Miss America gowns and crowns, sending little boys into breathless double takes—for a minute, by golly, you might mistake one for a real contestant.

I made it to the Press Hospitality Center in the nick of time. Here was a spread of ham and cheese sandwiches, sodas, TV monitors, and eight courtesy typewriters. A few hundred members of the straightest press I’d ever seen warmly greeted each other at this blessed event. They would spread the good news into every town and hamlet in the USA. Priority One Badges were given only to “wire service personnel,” reps of “area newspapers meeting deadlines,” official Miss America Pageant photogs, NBC News. These folks were given runway seats, and first privileges for interviews and pictures. I don’t recall what publications Priority Two encompassed, but they invented a brand new Priority Three for High Times. I picked up my press badge, with my name badly misspelled, and was directed to two wrong locations before being seated light-years from the stage in these sub-bleachers. An old, drunken photographer shared my location, hiccupping in a stupor. Above me was a thirty-foot-high monitor screen, the transparent backside of which I could see through if I craned my neck. From this I observed the pageant.

Rules, rules, rules. Not even Wink Martindale could crash the dressing rooms.

But no matter. Miss America was a good thing, not a negative thing, the most glamorous high-school graduation ceremony around. Hundreds of girls won fat scholarships through the bush leagues of the Miss America system, learned poise, dignity, the spirit of competition. These fifty angels had won local and state pageants, they were the pride and joy of their communities, an inspiration to millions of little lassies who dreamed of someday winning the coveted crown. The Miss America Pageant could also be a springboard to talk-show hostom, the most sought-after goal among contestants. These were Positive Girls, my favorite kind.

The show opened with a slapdash medley of pop songs that contained so many metaphorical references to prostitution, I gagged on my soda. “I’m a Working Girl,” they sang, leading into a chorus of “Les girls,” and some out-of-context lines from “I Am Woman.” Next, they introduced ten semifinalists in evening gowns to the tune of “Send in the Clowns.” Gary Collins was host—a second-rate sub for the out-to-pasture Bert Parks. His wife, Mary Ann Mobley, was among the parade of former Miss Americas who walked the runway before the show. Miss America 1933 got the largest applause on the 50th anniversary of her title, and there were many missing and/or dead Miss Americas who couldn’t make it.

Among the distinguished panel of seven judges were Foster Brooks, professional “drunk,” Rod McKuen, who recently saw fit to publicize himself as a victim of homosexual child-rape, and Wink Martindale, host of some atrocity called Tic-Tac-Dough. Now, here were fifty gals who had spent years training for this, the Olympics of beauty contests, and it all rode on the judgment of Foster, Rod and Wink. Or perhaps they were befitting judges for these slick, well-packaged, professional beauty contestants, carefully groomed by their town fathers to give two-sided answers and smile on cue, as they sought TV careers. But something about Wink irked the shit out of me.

The most bizarre “talent” of the evening was displayed by Miss Arizona. Although the program described it as “Free Form Gymnastics,” it was nothing short of contortion. She whipped her legs back over her spine into some grotesque spiderlike posture and crawled around the stage. Apparently, her sponsors felt this hideous contortion would cinch the crown, but who the hell needed a tarantula-woman for Miss America?

When the new Miss America took her celebrated walk down the runway, a brigade of eighteen New Jersey state troopers followed closely behind the TV camera, in case one of those Priority One press people made a lunatic lunge for the Miss.

The drunken photog awoke. “I’m gonna see what’s-iz-name, Brooks Foster,” he bragged, tripping past me. “And then I’ll say hello to my good pal, Wink.”

The big press conference for the Newly Crowned was held in the carnival tent Press Center. With her splendid-girl Court of Honor and a police escort, Miss America, having had an ample half-hour to wipe away the tears, and probably change panties, posed for ten minutes of pix (photogs only) in a sealed-off tent. Then, with cameras still whirring, she was escorted to the podium for questioning. Miss California she was, and just a tad slurry-looking compared to last year’s Elizabeth Ward, who was as wholesome as bleached Wonder Bread. Debra Sue Maffett, blond, twenty-five, former drum majorette, all-round Positive Girl, first defended her nose job as a “medical operation for a deviated septum”; all of her family had required nose jobs to correct this breathing problem (amyl poppers, coke abuse? Huffin’ glue? Lacquer heads? Bus-fume suckers?). Debra Sue dated several men (“No one seriously”), and was a member of the National Man Watcher’s Association, which led her to hand out Well Worth Watching cards to men at random.

It was later revealed that this winner, Miss California, had failed in three attempts to be crowned Miss Texas. After the third try at Texas, she had “extensive cosmetic surgery” before entering the California Pageant, according to the muckraking director of the Miss Texas Pageant. “Her nose, her chin, and I’m not sure what else.” (Debra Sue hailed from a small town actually called Cut and Shoot, Texas.)

Besides the twenty-grand pageant prize, Debra Sue would bring in over $100,000 during her Miss A. reign from public appearances and ads. “I’m still just Debbie and I’ll still be just Debbie when it’s over,” said the sweet thing. “I’d like to have a talk show, be a wife and mother, there’s so much I want to do—”

After the Saturday-night broadcast, at midnight, the pageant officially relinquished its supervision over all contestants, save for the new Miss America. The forty-nine losers were on their own, and most would skip town first thing in the morning. I had to act fast, and spent the following hour seeking the whereabouts of First Runner-Up, Desiree Denise Daniels, Miss Tennessee. She was on the sixth floor at the Tropicana. Only four messages awaited her at the front desk when I added mine—request for interview with High Times mag at her convenience on Sunday. I hit the blackjack tables till 4 a.m., checking the front desk every half-hour, but Miss Tennessee hadn’t answered her red message light. There was no answer each time the desk clerk phoned.

At 4 a.m. I discovered that every hotel on the boardwalk was booked solid. But I hadn’t counted on the flophouses being sold out, which they were during Miss America week. The next chapter of my Miss America nightmare unfolded with an endless series of NO VACANCY signs all the way to the back streets of the Monopoly board. Fleabag motel clerks found it laughable when I asked if they knew of any vacancies. I took to the streets, a loser at the casinos.

At 8 a.m., Room 217 at the Bull Shippers Plaza Motor Inn on Pennsylvania Avenue became available. I grabbed it. There was even a telephone, on which to make frantic backup calls for other contestant interviews. A Black hooker tried to bust into my room, but no dice, honey, I was here for the First Runner-Up. A dozen calls later, I broke through the incredible protective layers of hostesses and hometown security nets that surrounded Miss Tennessee. These girls were harder to reach than Bo Derek. Everything had to be cleared through some men in Room 4425 at Caesar’s—her “state traveling companions.” A fifteen-minute interlude could be arranged if I showed up at Caesar’s front desk by 11 a.m. Lying on a firm mattress at the Bull Shippers Inn, I nauseously refined my twenty Runner-Up questions.

Needless to say, some good old boys from Tennessee—tough-looking ones in their forties—showed up by noon. They explained something about “gals and schedules”; the women were still packing at the Tropicana, they apologized, and they’d have to catch a plane, so no interviews. I made a few more calls to sponsors of other contestants, but couldn’t even pin down Miss Alaska. The prettiest contestant of them all, Miss Georgia, was reportedly packing her last bags right there at Caesar’s, but her people also gave me the runaround. (Was it High Times? Should I have whipped out the Screw press pass?) Out in the streets, Miss America contestants and their entourages were leaving in unstoppable droves. But I had been a bad little reporter who came unconnected, and couldn’t even land whoever came in fiftieth. By this time, I would have even made a mad dash for Wink fuckin’ Martindale. But even he had skipped town.

© 1983, 2010, Josh Alan Friedman

Cracker Nights: Josh Alan plays and reads LIVE in Los Angeles July 7 - 11

2010-06-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

via CrackerNights.com:

Mark your calendars! New Texture Nights kick off in Los Angeles this July, with live readings and performances by Josh Alan Friedman (Black Cracker), Chris D. (A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die) and Black Cracker Online moderator Wyatt Doyle (Stop Requested). At most venues, Josh Alan - Czar of Atomic Acoustic Guitar - will play as well. (Listen to Josh Alan's music here.)

Here's the current calendar, but there are more events to come - check CrackerNights.com for an updated schedule!

Wednesday July 7, 2010

7 pm
Book Soup
8818 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles 90069-2125
Josh Alan Friedman, Chris D. and Wyatt Doyle reading

_________________________________________________________

Thursday July 8, 2010

6 pm
La Luz de Jesus Gallery / Wacko
4633 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles 90027-5413
Josh Alan Friedman, Chris D. and Wyatt Doyle reading

_________________________________________________________

Friday July 9, 2010

7 pm
Alias Books (West)
1650 Sawtelle Boulevard, Los Angeles 90025
Josh Alan Friedman, Chris D. and Wyatt Doyle reading

_________________________________________________________

Saturday, July 10

2 pm
Mystery & Imagination / Bookfellows
238 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale 91203
George Clayton Johnson Birthday Celebration
George Clayton Johnson, Josh Alan Friedman, Chris D. and Wyatt Doyle reading

6 pm - 9 pm
New Texture: Words & Music
@ The Echo
1822 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles 90026-3227
Josh Alan Friedman, Chris D., Wyatt Doyle and Georgina Spelvin reading
Musical performances by Reverend Raymond Branch and Josh Alan
Special guests Sandee Curry, Donna Lethal, Paul Silva and Matt Kennedy

_________________________________________________________

Sunday, July 11

7 pm
Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd., Venice 90291
Josh Alan Friedman, Chris D. and Wyatt Doyle reading

Coney Island (Part VI): Horace Bullard: You Can’t Dream Too Much

2010-06-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

So ends my series on poor old Coney Island, with the second part of an unpublished 1987 Village Voice assignment on would-be savior, Horace Bullard. Mr. Bullard’s noble 20-year odyssey was slowly battered apart by a Brooklyn political machine resembling the Tower of Babel. Bullard’s Coney Island properties, understandably, ended up in serious tax arrears. After Mayor Giuliani took office in 1994, he apparently killed Bullard’s plans in favor of constructing the (minor league Mets-affiliate) Brooklyn Cyclones’ KeySpan Park. It’s suspected Giuliani ordered an early morning demolition on the crumbling Thunderbolt roller coaster, which Bullard wanted to restore. Half-Black, half-Puerto Rican, the Kansas Fried Chicken founder Bullard charged in court that Giuliani’s actions were motivated by racial bias.

The International Theme Park Service told Bullard he’d need a larger amusement area to make the whole thing profitable, to handle the projected crowds. And so, he’s currently looking at Drierofferman Park—150 unused Brooklyn acres a mile away for parking, an area conservationists don’t want used.

“By taking the parking a mile away, you won’t have cars all over the street. We’ll shuttle people. Parades can run down Surf Avenue. I also wanna get a Coney Island express train from Times Square.”

The most colorful chart on Mr. Bullard’s coffee table shows his current plans. They contain several unique attractions, recreating a few of Coney’s legendary rides. The parachute drop will be rebuilt. The Steeplechase wooden mechanical horse race ride, which once circled the Pavilion of Fun in a “steeple chase” (thus the name), is being recreated. Bullard hopes to revamp the old Thunderbolt, now rotting in its lot. He’ll build a mountain on Surf Avenue with waterfalls, a rapids and a runaway train. A castle at the top will contain a museum for Dodgers and Coney Island memorabilia.

Bullard also wants a Walk of Fame, setting plaques for Brooklyn’s famous sons and daughters who are willing to return for a dedication. “We were gonna include a memorial to George C. Tilyou (Steeplechase’s 19th century creator).” Unfortunately, the Tilyou estate is fighting to prevent usage of the demonic cartoon face that was Steeplechase’s trademark symbol. “After that much opposition, we figured not to bother with a memorial. Because Tilyou was a genius doesn’t mean his descendants are.”

Coney Island business and government figures express both strong support and lingering doubts. Sam Horowitz, the area’s councilman for 16 years, envisions Coney as having “great bookends.” The Aquarium, Cyclone and Astroland on one side, a giant new Steeplechase on the other. “If Bullard isn’t able to deliver,” says Horowitz, “that will be the last shot for Steeplechase returning. It all sounds terrific, but I’m disappointed with the delays. I’d hate to see Steeplechase just lay there with a few park benches. This is one of New York’s most valued properties, it’s the Brooklyn Riviera on the Atlantic Ocean.”

The Atlantic is a third bookend. When Fred Trump purchased Steeplechase after it closed in the ’60s, he wanted to erect deluxe housing. Councilman Horowitz owned the Tilyou Movie Theatre in 1965, across from Steeplechase. His neighborhood defeated Trump’s plans, and the city bought back the hallowed ground.

“Drierofferman Park,” worries Horowitz, “where Bullard wants parking, sits near a high-rise area. They might get up in arms about having thousands of cars come through their neighborhood. I’m in favor of filling in the Coney Island Creek for parking. It’s just polluted water, a one-time waterway for boats, goes right up to the Brooklyn Union Gas sight. This creek has no value whatsoever, and could fulfill the parking without infringing on residents.”

Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel says an urban renewal is in store for Coney, regardless of whether a new amusement park emerges. “He’s got all the permits and licenses he needs from us. We’re very excited by his plans. All our eggs are in Bullard’s basket.”

Under the Boardwalk (photo: Nathan Kensinger)

Under current plans, the eroded beach, where mass bathing was invented in America, will be enlarged, marinas and promenades added. The boardwalk will likely be sealed up underneath. Despite its song-worthy appeal, Under the Boardwalk (Coney is where the song took place) is an underworld for citizens to defecate, sleep and escape with wallets after muggings.

Dennis Paperman, President of the Brighton Beach Board of Trade (Coney’s sister neighborhood), says, “The revitalization of Coney Island has been dumped on for the past 20 years. Things must be done now. Bullard’s intentions are honorable, but I was told he’ll need $162-million. To my understanding that kind of backing has not been given. We don’t want more speculation here. The project, to me, remains a dream.”

The New York City Public Development Corporation, however, says it read two “letters of interest” demonstrating Bullard had over a hundred-million cash behind him. “The project then reached a new plateau,” says Frank Marino. “Horace also had spent $6 million from his own pocket so far, which impressed us.” Marino says the project still must pass through ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure), a standard red-tape process. The parking is also an unresolved issue with Public Development. “We think this project, however, could start a Coney Island renaissance. The next six months will be critical to it happening or not.”

Max Rosey, who can recite the entire evolution of the hot dog, is public relations director for Nathan’s: “Bullard’s respected in the community and we wish him well. His plans are for the good of the people, and Nathan’s would love a major new amusement park here.”

Only slumlord landowner Hy Singer—Bullard’s “ca-ca” nemesis—refuses to comment on the whole affair. He is in litigation, does not want to be “tried by the press.” (He furthermore became overly suspicious as to whether this reporter was not some rival’s shill, and cancelled a meeting at Nathan’s—“You should be grateful I’m calling,” said Singer, “and not just standing you up.”)

Ca-Ca Man: Slumlord Hy Singer (left), now Chairman of the Kings County Republican Committee

Bullard recently toured Canada, Germany, the Great Adventures and Disneylands (“Boring.” He was only impressed by Epcot Center). Many of his rides will have to be European imports, except for the Coney Island recreations. And an eagle ride Bullard designed: “They make a looping platform called the Flying Carpet. I got hold of the manufacturer and said I want the same contraption built into an eagle. I want the head to turn in the direction he’s flying. When you’re walking on the midway, this eagle is swooping at ya.”

In the old days, operators used to say if riders knew how safe the rides were, they wouldn’t scream. “Today, you’re restricted with rides because of insurance,” explains Bullard. “You couldn’t have a ride like the Big Slide today, where people hung by ropes and slid down into sand. Somebody’d say they twisted their neck. You didn’t have the craze for lawsuits then. Today you’ve got to make every ride 100% safe, yet try and make it feel almost safe. When I go to these manufacturers, I tell them my rides have to be suicide-proof.”

Bullard gets misty-eyed, the park comes alive: “My ticket takers are gonna wear the RKO usher-type uniforms and bark, ‘Have your tickets ready!’ Everyone in this park is gonna be an actor. The guy sweeping is gonna be an actor. The workers are gonna have fun. The benches will look like animals. I have three sets of architects so far, and I don’t wanna get stuck with one guy’s placid Midwestern look. I gotta make sure the architects don’t lose that feeling. A smart operator goes around the world looking for strange things to bring into their park.”

He feels freak shows are passé, won’t put deformed folks on display, which the Coney Island of yore did. Snake charmers, sword swallowers or the Fattest Man in the World would be okay. “We’d use him to say this is why you shouldn’t overeat.” (Bradshaw’s Circus of World Curiosities is an old-timey sideshow currently working the Coney seashore.)

How about all those mom-and-pop spookhouses and sleazy little attractions that used to spice up the side streets?

“You’re gonna get all that back, between 15th Street and Astroland. We want that, to rent out stores as cheap as possible and create more carnival novelties. We want barkers all over, a requirement for each store, carny folks, off-Broadway actors.”

Will he reopen the theater in the Shore building for vaudeville?

“That will stay office space. There has to be a balance here between fantasy and business. You can’t dream too much. I mean, I’m doing enough dreaming.”

For further dreaming:

http://imagineconey.com/

© 1987, 2010, Josh Alan Friedman

Coney Island (Part V): Horace Bullard’s Impossible Dream

2010-06-07T00:02:00.000-07:00

I was assigned the following piece in 1987. Then-Village Voice editor Martin Gottlieb, a former and future Times man, displayed an impenetrable air of self-importance. Whenever I was at the Voice office, Gottlieb only emerged from his lair surrounded by a tight coterie of sycophants, making the rounds like some comical taskforce. Intimidation was key, at least the way I experienced it. But at that time, the Voice still had some clout. It was feasible that my Horace Bullard story might have tipped the scales more in favor of getting the ball rolling for Coney Island. A political endorsement, you might say. I was tortured with aimless rewrites for months. Then the Voice killed it without explanation at the 11th hour. Gottlieb preferred to see Coney Island remain a wasteland, and Horace Bullard’s long moment came and went. From Mayor Giuliani on down, it seemed the whole world shit on Bullard’s impossible dream.

To this day, the stifling local politics of rebuilding Coney Island is so convoluted and poisoned with opprobrium, it’s like trying to broker a peace deal in the Mid-East.

Restoring Coney Island’s heyday would be like restoring the aristocratic era of 42nd Street—it would take a time machine. But Horace Bullard, owner of the Kansas Fried Chicken empire, has been working toward this seemingly unattainable mission for a decade. The job has its headaches.

In his Riverdale penthouse, overlooking the Hudson, the 48-year-old Mr. Bullard appears more like a newly retired athlete in robes than a P.T. Barnum. A great church organ sits in his living room; items of Coney Island lore are arranged across the coffee table. He has an archival sense of Coney’s history:

“We’re not building an amusement park just to incorporate rides. The rides are only $40-million; the park will cost $150-million. When I went to Great Adventure, I told the architect, ‘This is an example of what I do not want.’ We’re trying to bring back this Coney Island feeling,” he says, holding aloft copies of Sodom by the Sea and Good Old Coney Island, two long out-of-print books.

The soulless Great Adventure/Six Flags chain is a homogenous, corporate type of amusement park. There is nothing regional or unique about them. They’re landfilled with European rides which offer quick, visceral jolts. They lack imagination, carny atmosphere and gourmet junk food—even the smell of cotton candy is eliminated by enclosed food stands.

But the Coney Island ghetto sits on hallowed ground. The remains are like a Mediterranean archeological site. An end-of-the line subway still spells out Sodom by the Sea. The scent of giant lollipops and steamed corn is infused in the tile walls. Philip’s Saltwater Taffee is manufactured right in a 60-year-old subway store, across from Nathan’s, where hot dogs were first popularized, and perhaps never surpassed. A 19th century pissoir still runs in the public men’s room.

Bullard was raised in East Harlem, and never visited Coney Island until 1965: “I was too poor to even take a subway there. I was in my 20’s the first time I went. Never saw so many people in my life. I was an oil burner repairman then and never dreamt what I’d be doing now.”

Bullard didn’t make it to any amusement parks or stadiums as a kid. But he never forgot that first taste of Nathan’s in 1965. Four years later he returned to Coney Island when a slumlord named Hy Singer locked up the equipment and tripled the rent of a Kentucky Fried Chicken by the Boardwalk. Bullard brought in an operator to run a Kansas Fried Chicken on the location, one of his earliest franchises (he now owns 22).

Bullard’s third visit to Coney was in 1978, when his saga began: “I bought the Shore Theatre building, which was abandoned and boarded up. I built a Kansas Fried on the corner. But when summer came, I saw there were no people. I remembered this area was loaded with people when I visited in the ’60s. I asked Astroland, ‘What the hell happened?’ They said, ‘The landowners here don’t work together, they brought in the Blacks, they destroyed the area.’ The Astroland rides did good business because they maintained their park. But the 35 other landowners did not work together. No promotion, no air shows—nothing but fighting. I said, ‘Let’s get them all together.’”

The carnival rubble Bullard witnessed was the same then as now [in 1987]. Abandoned seaside attractions line the village streets. Crumbling, sea-beaten pavilions, according to their burned-out, neon fossil facades, once offered “Entertainment” and “Dancing.” Vaudeville shows, like the Tahiti Dancing Girls, were “hotter ’n horseradish.” The World of Wax is deserted. Junkyard dogs yap from fenced-in lots, the rides they protect reduced to rubble. A chocolate factory, in a pigeon-infested stucco building, still operates by the Riegelmann Boardwalk at 22nd Street.

The most imposing ghost is the parachute drop, rusting in its beachfront lot since Steeplechase closed in 1964. Built in 1939, the parachute drop was repainted every three years to ward off the effects of salt air upon its metal. It now hasn’t been painted since 1964. Engineers, who observe it standing through storms, say it is still sturdy.

Completely vanished is the huge Steeplechase Pavilion of Fun, where the “Insanitarium” contained swaying barrels, winking cartoon demons, dancing card decks and a midget blowing air blasts up ladies’ skirts. Wooden horses, six wide, raced over a 3,100-foot course, where paid screamers acted as shills. In 1910, you got 25 rides for 25 cents; a few decades later, it became known as a “Nickel Empire.”

Project housing went up around Luna Park and Dreamland, two of the great amusement parks of turn-of-the-century Coney Island. But Steeplechase, the third park, has been kept free from development for two decades, since closing. This was a stroke of far-sighted wisdom. Steeplechase is prodigal land, awaiting a savior’s wand.

“So, in 1978,” continues Horace Bullard, “we called a Chamber of Commerce meeting. I brought down an architect. I said, gentlemen, there’s talk of gambling for Coney Island. What we should do is redesign this C-7 zone—the entire amusement area. If gambling is to be voted in, we’ll put up one hotel. We’ll only allow this single hotel, which will sponsor a whole new amusement park. It can bring us back Coney Island.

“Then all these people started arguing. ‘Who are you, where’d you come from, you’re an outsider, a stranger, how did you get that building on the corner, we were trying to buy it.’ So I formed a local development corporation, with a board of directors. I tried to get the Aquarium, Nathan’s, Astella Development Corporation, Father Gillespie, everyone in the community to attend. On the table I put the entire map of Coney Island. I asked all of them to go to work on this map and redesign Coney Island to what we all think it should be. Then let’s go and fight for it, make it happen—rather than each one try and do our little thing, let us collectively go to Albany and say, ‘Gambling is being considered, fine, we’ll take one casino—Hyatt, Hilton, whoever, then we’ll redevelop the rest our way.”

The once great seaside resort of Coney has only one visible hotel today—the Surf Hotel. The desk madam is hesitant to provide a stranger with a $30 room. It’s a welfare operation. “Mae West used to live here,” she says, in broken English. “But there’s nothing to tell about now. You don’t want to know. Go to the library.”

“The guy who owns the Surf, Hy Singer, is responsible for part of Coney Island’s destruction,” says Bullard. “He wanted to make the Stauch’s Baths site a welfare hotel. Anything he’s ever touched,” Bullard says with regret, “has gone down the drain.” He points to the map. “There was a roller coaster here, a bobsled there, go-carts.”

Slumlord Hy Singer inherited property in the garment district, then came to Coney in the 1960s after Steeplechase closed, to buy land. Bullard is in litigation, trying to acquire some of it. “Singer’s driven by money, but doesn’t know how to make a deal. He entered into a contract to sell this plot for $950,000. When our project was announced, he reneged. ‘I sold it too cheap, I was fooled, I was conned,’ cried Singer.”

Stauch’s Baths, another unintentional haunted house by the sea, contains art nouveau stone carvings. Bullard feels the sight is essential when Coney returns, and must not be turned into welfare space. He may even salvage the stone carvings for future construction, to be modeled somewhat on the cardboard Venice look of the original Dreamland.

Bullard feels his 1978 proposal to the Chamber of Commerce was a great plan: “The casino would pay for the privilege of being exclusive. That money would have been used to transform the entire C-7 zone for an amusement park, then give the community $15 million a year, annually, to do whatever they wanted for improvements—trees, extra security, facades, shopping. We’d form an umbrella corporation—whatever square footage you own, you’d own shares proportionately. Hy Singer gets up—‘Why should we give the community $15 million dollars? I ca ca on the community! I’m a businessman.’ That’s what he said. They started calling me a communist, you’re talking about socialism, you’re gonna give our profits to the community. I was shocked.”

The local Tenants Association would not even show at Bullard’s meetings. “I said, what have you got to lose? If you’re against gambling, sit at the table and fight it. Anything you don’t like, vote it down.”

Finally, Bullard persuaded a group of tenants to visit his architect’s office in Manhattan. He showed them the plans: “Tell us where this is no good, where it doesn’t help or hurts you,” he asked. Tenants were afraid property values would rise, rents would increase, and they’d be pushed out. Since the Urban Development Corporation owned their buildings, Bullard had a rep from the UDC present.

It turned out their mortgages were all in default. I said great. When we put this package together, we’ll buy out the mortgages. We’ll pump a few million into their buildings for electrical repair, then we would sell the apartments to the tenants for a dollar each. So now, if there’s any increase in value, they’ll own it. Instantly, if gambling had come to Coney Island, these project housing tenants would have become middle-class people. They would have had $50,000 apartments for a dollar. Then they could stay, or sell. But they couldn’t handle that whole idea. Again, I was shocked.”

Bullard went to the tenants’ public meetings. He heard them call his plan “pie in the sky.” It sounded too good, they worried, what’s the catch, what was in it for the developer? He merely told them he’d make a lot of money by owning 15% of the amusement area, plus the honor of having brought back Coney Island. Even Father Gillespie, asked not to judge the morality of gambling since the church had bingo, looked over Bullard’s plans, then looked to the ceiling.

“I’m about to endorse gambling,” the clergyman said, in approval. “God help me.” But he never showed at the next meeting.

Many of the chief Coney Island landowners refused to sit on any corporation board of Bullard’s, and they bickered between themselves over whose land was worth more. Hy “ca-ca” Singer and Nathan’s wanted to be paid just to join the corporation, without giving anything. So Bullard walked away from his Plan A in 1981, upset to this day that Coney Island spurned “a once-in-a-lieftime opportunity.” He would have taken the group to Albany to lobby, sign petitions, go on TV.

The local businessmen figured they were going to get gambling anyway, even without Horace Bullard. Bullard received a call three months later from the same folks who wouldn’t join his plan. They needed him. A Black caucus was lobbying against gambling. “I had told them to go up with a plan where everyone benefits. Why should poor citizens vote for gambling—just so those landowners could get rich selling their property?” The gambling motion was tabled.

Bullard, at this point, figured to hell with the community, he’d do it all himself. When they saw how real his dream was, they’d come in. His Plan B involved building a carnival with two floating hotels on the old Steeplechase pier. He’d lobby the state for a five-year gambling test, for two competing hotels. If it was decided afterward that gambling was a detriment, he’d “cut the ropes to the hotels,” and float them off. In the meanwhile, however, they would have sponsored rebuilding Coney Island to the tune of “a couple of hundred-million dollars.”

But then some European investors approached, told him to forget about gambling, and offered to sponsor the amusement park. The city gave him the go ahead. Bullard acquired more property, designed a 17-and-1/2-acre park, abandoned the idea of a public corporation, or lobbying for gambling hotels. He pulled out the plans which he next showed the city:

“The city said, ‘Forget it, we made a bad deal, we never thought you were gonna build something this serious.’ I had the investors, everything ready to go.”

Another 18 months of lease re-negotiations with New York ensued. “It took me a long time to get the city into this nostalgic Coney Island feeling. Right now [in 1987], I think they’re on board. We’ve finished negotiations. I gave them back land I paid a million for, I gave them more money, I was forced to agree with everything. Then I bought $2 million more land for parking. But the dilemma now is whether we wanna build a 17-and-1/2-acre park, or go to 30 acres. If we go larger, we’ll be taking up space previously allocated for parking. Then we’d have to secure remote parking.”

Continued next week...

© 1987, 2010, Josh Alan Friedman

Coney Island (Part IV)

2010-05-31T00:02:00.000-07:00

So ends this sketchy, rudimentary overview I did for a documentary filmmaker 20 years ago. But next week this space will run my unpublished Village Voice interview with Horace Bullard on the reconstruction of Coney Island—that never happened.

The sublime element of sleaze became more prominent through the 1950s and ’60s. There was further decay as property taxes rose with the minimum wage. Mom-and-pop rides and side-street spook houses across Surf Avenue cut costs on maintenance and appearance.

Power broker Robert Moses, New York’s commissioner of parks, had a spiteful dislike of Coney Island. Jones Beach on Long Island—Moses’ defining parks achievement—was a pristine “passive park.” No hurly burly, no cotton candy, concessionaires or gypsies. The Marine Beach Theater presented Guy Lombardo and operettas. Moses built six-lane highways, but he wouldn’t repave the streets of Coney Island. The Belt Parkway, built to provide tri-state access out to Jones Beach, bypassed Coney Island with no exits or markers. This was an unforgivable insult to the old-timers on Surf Avenue.

Coney Island reached its peak attendance of 2.5 million on July 3, 1947. But as cars became a middle-class commodity, and highways led out to Long Island, attendance declined through the 1950s. Once the grand destination of steamers, buses and subways, Coney Island was not equipped for parking thousands of cars. Throughout the ’50s, neighborhood demographics shifted to Black and Puerto Rican tenants, as whites fled to the suburbs. Coney’s bathhouses closed. One old-timer attributed this to the development of nylon and Dacron bathing suits. Synthetic materials dried easily, people could change in their car or throw clothes over a bathing suit. Aside from changing rooms, the old bathhouses rented cotton and woolen suits.

In the late ’50s, Steeplechase began to receive complaints from seminarians. Knee-length skirts blown above the waistline provoked prurient heckling. Some gals wore no panties. So the Pantomime Theater—rude clowns with electric cattle prods and paddles that whacked women’s fannies—was discontinued. The horny dwarf, Little Angelo, was gone.

Coney Island withstood greater peril with each decade. Still, it created one-of-a-kind rides, never duplicated. Showmen with no formal training would dream up rides in the winter, and go for broke, gamble all they had. If one engineer said it couldn’t be done, the next would build it. A half-dozen landmarks have survived most of the 20th century as a testament to this ingenuity.

The Cyclone roller coaster was built in 1927 for over $100,000. Its first drop is 83 feet, providing a spiritual kick to the adrenal system. It originally cost 25 cents to ride. Today [in the 1980s] the brakemen appear supremely bored. But they still herd in flocks of customers, who emerge from the exit in a euphoric mood. The creaky wooden frame is beloved by millions; many aficionados still consider it the world’s preeminent coaster. [The Cyclone, now $8 a ride, still thrives in the 21st Century—an isolated, but official New York City and National Historic Landmark.]

The Thunderbolt opened in 1925, with a fabulous 90-degree first drop. Its owners, the Morans, resided in a home built within the roller coaster. Inside was a perfectly normal household, the only odd effect being that the dishes rattled and the walls shook every three minutes as the ’Bolt roared overhead. Mrs. Moran, after 40 years, didn’t even notice, and even visiting dinner guests [of which I was one] gradually became accustomed to it. Their backyard was like a lost-and-found, typical of any roller coaster. It was littered with watches, wigs, glasses, billfolds, false teeth, a cop’s gun. One rider accidentally scattered $4,500 in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, which the Morans recovered fully for the passenger. Featured in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, the Thunderbolt ceased operation when Fred Moran died in 1982.

Steeplechase did not modernize during its last decade, the 1960s. It could have inherited new rides from Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, which was operated by the family that started the Cyclone. Infighting amongst the Tilyou heirs prevented progress. Steeplechase closed after the 1964 season, the cause of much sadness in Brooklyn. The Tilyous sold the land to notorious Queens developer Fred Trump, Donald’s father. Trump held a party celebrating the demolition of the great Victorian structure in 1966. He offered bricks to throw at the Pavilion of Fun’s windows, with plans to develop luxury housing. Trump’s land was never developed and remains a wasteland to this day.

The new Astroland became the predominant amusement park of Coney Island when Steeplechase closed. Converted from the Feltman restaurant property in 1962, it continued to grow until 1975. Still, the landmarks outside of Astroland took on more significance. Coney was bookended by the Cylone on one side and the Thunderbolt on the other. A third major roller coaster, the Tornado, remained in-between. The Bobsled, brought to Coney in 1940 from the New York World’s Fair, was a crazed indoor coaster. Low-tech spookhouses and bumper cars rumbled over sparky electric tracks on the side streets. Also surviving was the terrifying Wonder Wheel. Built in 1920, its Ferris wheel passenger cars creak back and forth on rollers as they revolve through the sky.

Steeplechase’s parachute jump also arrived from the World’s Fair in 1940, and still stands like a proud skeleton. Engineers at first claimed the 250-foot tower couldn’t be erected near the water. With 12 chutes on cables, the ride provided a thrilling 20-foot free fall, until the chute opened. It was entirely different from today’s jumps, which run like high-speed elevators, with no free fall. Today’s generic, assembly-line rides, built on the metric system, are ordered from Europe for theme parks.

Though ruins are respected in Europe for millennia, America destroys its history for quick kills. This is the domain of the real estate speculator. Project housing now festers where Luna Park and Dreamland once stood.

Riots in Brooklyn erupted during the late 1960s. Concessionaires on Surf Avenue were hung by their feet, their little carny operations looted. High-voltage cables from entire rides were yanked out during the night. Like other inner cities, Coney Island was tainted by arsons, vandalism, junkies, muggers of old people, welfare cases and syphilitic streetwalkers.

Yet the season began each year, with millions still attending. In the 1980s, Coney Island came close to a grand vision for revival: casino gambling, a la Atlantic City. Attempting to pull of this wizardly feat was Horace Bullard, owner of the Kansas Fried Chicken chain. For a decade he studied Coney’s history, spent millions acquiring property, and hired architects to design a proposed $150-million nostalgic recreation of Steeplechase.

Bullard disliked soulless corporate theme parks like Six Flags, landfilled with European rides, lacking carny atmosphere and gourmet junk food. Where even the smell of cotton candy is eliminated by enclosed food stands.

Bullard encountered 35 individual landowners on Coney Island, most of whom would not work together. Like a Tower of Babel. The Tilyou estate even fought to prevent usage of the Steeplechase face. Bullard had planned a museum at the top of his park for the Brooklyn Dodgers and George C. Tilyou. “After that much opposition,” he said, “we figured not to bother with a memorial. Because Tilyou was a genius doesn’t mean his descendants are.” In the old days, operators said if riders knew how safe rides were, they wouldn’t scream. But in an age of litigation, Bullard wanted his rides suicide-proof.

Yet Coney Island could not be budged. It sits today [in the 1980s] on hallowed ground, like a Mediterranean archaeological site. The scent of giant lollipops and steamed corn still infuses the old tile walls at the Stillwell Avenue station, where four subways reach their destination. Philip’s Saltwater Taffee is manufactured in the same subway shop since the 1920s, across from Nathan’s. An ancient pissoir runs in the public men’s room.

There is still two-and-a-half miles of beachfront. The wooden Boardwalk, two miles long, 80 feet wide, is superbly maintained. Each summer brings out Bradshaw’s Circus of World Curiosities, along with airplane shows in the sky. Astroland and Dino’s Wonder Wheel Park open each season. Only three classic rides are still in operation: The Cyclone, the B&B carousel and the Wonder Wheel. And there is Nathan’s.

Much of Coney is carnival rubble. Abandoned sea-beaten pavilions, with burned-out neon-fossil facades. Barely visible lettering that once boasted Dancing and Entertainment. The World of Wax is deserted, crumbling, the Thunderbolt lays rotting [it was finally ordered demolished by Mayor Giuliani in 2000]. Junkyard dogs yap from fenced-in lots, the rides they protect reduced to rubble. Fred Trump once offered to raze the Parachute Drop, calling it a “piece of rust.” But engineers said it was still sturdy, even through storms, and it still stands.

An odd sign bearing a familiar leering face, posted by a group called the Coney Island Hysterical Society, reads:

“Steeplechase Park. . . Come back. . . Come back. . .”

Thunderbolt in 1995

Coney Island (Part III)

2010-05-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

Charles Dickens supposedly found Coney Island the only thing to his liking in America. Noted music critic, James Huneker, picked up on the sucker ethic, perfected at Coney, wherein people are supposed to enjoy being conned out of their money on the midway: “Every device imaginable by which man may be separated from his dimes without adequate return is in operation. You. . . go into a funny house. . . and later are tumbled into the open, insulted, mortified, disgusted, angry—and laughing.”

In 1906, the Russian socialist realism writer, Maxim Gorky, found “a slimy marsh of boredom. . . mean panderers to debased tastes unfold the disgusting nakedness of their falsehood.” But the ambivalent Gorky wrote of Luna Park at night: “A fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Fabulous and beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful is this fiery scintillation.”

In 1907, George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase burned down—the first of several fatal fires to hit Coney Island. The next morning, before the ruins was posted this sign:

I had troubles yesterday that I have not today
I have troubles today that I had not yesterday
On this site will be erected a bigger, better Steeplechase Park.
Admission to the Burning ruins—10 cents.

In nine months, Tilyou constructed a Victorian palace of cast-iron and glass. It was named the Pavilion of Fun, with an eight-horse-race ride surrounding it. Rain or shine, the new Steeplechase, in 1908, was an indoor amusement park, topped by a five-acre funhouse. It would stand until 1966, when the Trump organization demolished it.

For six years after Dreamland was built, the three parks of Coney Island flourished. Dreamland, with its upscale pretensions and political jobbery, never quite reached the popularity of the other two. Then on opening Memorial Day of the 1911 season, the greatest spectacle ever to hit Coney Island occurred. All of Dreamland went up in flames. It began with an electrical short in the papier-mâché Hell Gate ride—the park’s recreation of Hell. The flames went higher than any of Coney’s towers. Bullets flew from exploding ammo in the shooting galleries. White castles melted, 50,000 rental bathing suits turned to ash. Most horrific and tragic, animals died screaming within their cages, parrots flew through the air on fire. Manic lions ran through the streets, their manes ablaze, and were shot down in hails of police bullets.

Thirty three fire companies came through the night, as the flames spread out of Dreamland, destroying other landmarks. The Midget City Fire Department, after enacting hundreds of false alarms, fought with miniature pumps to save their Old Nuremberg building. All that remained was rubble—and the famous waltz, “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” written by Beth Slater Witson and Leo Friedman in 1909.

The next day, a million New Yorkers paid 10 cents to view the smoldering ruins. Dreamland was never rebuilt.

Luna’s Elmer Dundy died in 1907. His co-founder, Frederic Thompson, died an alcoholic in 1919. A business group then took control of Luna Park, refusing to put back money for upkeep. There were a lot of light bulbs to change. It slowly deteriorated, until Luna too was devastated by a fire in 1944. Wild rumors circulated about Ebbet’s Field relocating there. It was razed in 1946.

Perhaps Luna’s most remarkable contribution to science were the Preemies, which it inherited from Dreamland. From 1904 through 1943, the Premature Baby Incubators were directed by Dr. Martin Arthur Couney, who invented the mechanical baby incubator in the 1890s. The medical profession was uninterested, so he accepted Thompson’s offer to set up shop at Luna. Here was a combination of medical integrity and showmanship. A miniature hospital exhibit, showing oxygen supplied through tubes to babies, with five wet nurses—any of whom was fired if caught eating the local junk food. Dr. Couney saved over 6,500 of the 8,000 prematures delivered to him, many from poor families. His Coney Island babies, who never would have survived in the outside world, held reunions years later at Coney Island.

After World War I, the 5-cent subway reached Coney. Crowds quadrupled from 250,000 to a million per day—phenomenal by modern count, where Disneyland might peak at four-million attendance in a year. The crowds became a working-class melting pot, as tens of thousands of Jews, Italians and Irish bordered Coney’s neighborhood. The three great racetracks were outlawed in 1916. Luna Park’s War of the Worlds and other disasters held less interest after the real world war. But the sideshows and cabarets were training grounds for Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Mae West, Houdini and George Burns. Silent screen star Marie Dressler sold popcorn in her youth, Clara Bow sold hot dogs at Nathan’s. Cary Grant was a stilt walker at Steeplechase.

Nathan Handwerker didn’t invent the hot dog, but worked a grill for the restaurant where they originated. German immigrant Charles Feltman came up with the process in 1869, on the Coney Island shore. Nobody knew what went into his Red Hots, as they were named, so they began calling them Hot Dogs. By World War I, when Feltman’s huge seaside restaurant, with its own roller coaster and dance hall, was selling 10-cent hot dogs, Nathan’s opened nearby, undercutting him with 5-cent hot dogs and 3-cent sodas. The fat French fries were unique. Campaigning presidents and New York mayors posed often with a Nathan’s hot dog in their mugs; the king and queen of England posed with Feltman’s.

Some old-timers swear the more expensive Feltman’s was greater, but Nathan’s became a 20th Century junk food institution. Sinatra once flew a few Nathan’s hot dogs to Europe by jet, when lonely for a taste of Brooklyn. Feltman’s restaurant grounds kept up its Gay 90s décor for six decades, still screening silent flicks in the 1940s. It closed in the ’50s. Nathan’s went on to franchise inferior chain locations across New York. None of them compare to the magical preparation of its salt-air Coney Island base, which still thrives today.

Cabarets were closed during Prohibition, but many sideshows opened through the 1930s. The Tahiti Dancing Girls were “hotter’n horse radish.” At the opening of the 1936 season, Angelo the dwarf, of Steeplechase, boasted to Post columnist Earl Wilson, “I’ve seen more undies, close up, with the women in them, than any man alive.” His job was to whack women’s fannies with a dingbat while their skirts blew up from floorboard airbursts. His disreputable behavior as a carnie molester finally got him fired.

Unfazed by the Depression, Steeplechase offered a 50-cent ticket for 50 rides. Poor folks could buy a 25-cent ticket for half as many. They also hired Black employees, encouraging Black attendance in an era when other state fairs designated special Negro Days. Negro bus parties drove in from Baltimore and D.C. While the rest of Coney Island and the beach seemed off-limits, Steeplechase wasn’t. Only its huge outdoor pool remained segregated, right until the last season in 1964. Jimmy Onorato, the manager, once speculated it was a miracle that Blacks never tried to enter the pool all those years. “I think that some of the season bathers would have maimed them if they did,” he said.

George C. Tilyou died in 1914, whereupon his 18-year-old son took charge. The Tilyou family remained the owners, though feuding erupted upon the death of Edward, George’s eldest, in 1944. But while the rest of Coney Island took on a slow pall of age, Steeplechase had a new coat of paint each season, with manicured lawns, uniformed employees and three dozen American flags. Before building Disneyland, Walt Disney spent a week with Jimmy Onorato, Steeplechase’s manager of 37 years.

Next week: Roller coasters and sublime sleaze.

© 1990, 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

Coney Island (Part II)

2010-05-17T00:02:00.000-07:00

Scott Russo Archive

Dreamland opened in 1904, outdoing all that came before. Political favoritism surrounded the incredible speed in which the $3.5-million, virgin-white park was built.

There were a million lights at Dreamland, compared to Luna Park’s 250,000; two chutes to Luna’s one; a 375-foot tower, which was 200 feet taller than Luna’s tower. Only the Park Row Building in New York stood taller, in this pre-skyscraper age. Dreamland’s central spire tower matched exactly the 22-story height of the Times Tower, completed in Times Square that year. “Everything New, But the Ocean,” ran the ad slogan.

The entrance to Dreamland led to a Biblical spectacular called Creation. Senator Reynolds strove for gentility with his Canals of Venice, and imitation Renaissance palaces. Dreamland’s mock city fire, with some 200 fleeing victims, showed a fire department extinguish flames in a six-story building. Luna had a four-story fire. The miniature steam railroad at Dreamland went electric in 1910. Luna stayed with steam. Electric train travel would later outmode steam in the real world.

The Dreamland railroad ran through Lilliputia, a colony of 300 midgets in a miniature world, with its own midget circus, music hall, police, and a midget fire department dashing to false alarms. Here lived Mrs. General Tom Thumb, widow of the world famous Barnum midget, now remarried to a tiny Italian count.

Untold numbers of Africans, Filipinos and Aborigines were shepherded to Coney Island, living under god knows what kind of slave-labor conditions. Samuel Gumpertz, hired as Dreamland’s manager by Reynolds, often traveled to Africa and Asia, importing freaks and tribesmen. He lured 212 Bantoc tribesmen, alleged headhunters who ate dog casseroles and lived in Hipa huts by the Coney Island sea. Aside from living expenses, they supposedly received $1.50 a week.

While Luna Park had a circus, Dreamland presented Bostock’s Animal Show. One witness described Bostock’s bears, leopards, lions and tigers as having been “tortured into talent.” Most famous among Luna’s elephant herd was Topsy, who helped build the park. Topsy killed three men in three years, one of whom fed the six-ton animal a lighted cigarette. In a shameless public relations move, Luna co-creator Elmer Dundy brought in Edison’s men to utilize Luna Park’s electric plant for something new. With her keeper refusing to take part, Topsy was electrocuted in public.

Coney Island became known throughout the Western world as the City of Fire. Yet much of its façade was built of lathe, burlap and cardboard. Immigrants arriving from Europe saw the Steeplechase Ferris wheel from 38 miles at sea, before the Statue of Liberty. It is inconceivable today to imagine how 19th century townsfolk, newly accustomed to electricity, were dumbstruck by 1.2-million light bulbs. “Enough light to illuminate a city of 500,000 souls,” according to Scientific American magazine, which did yearly profiles on each upcoming season at Coney. People were frightened and dazzled. Sigmund Freud, in his only trip to America, came to ponder Dreamland one day in 1909. The founder of psychoanalysis would have entered the park by way of a tunnel that ran between the thighs of a 30-foot nude female carving with boobs the size of elephants. Freud later called America “a gigantic mistake.”

The exotic route to Coney was by way of steamer, squadrons of which landed on the piers each day. The middle-class came by locomotive, through Brooklyn coal yards and soap factories. The mechanical rides were nothing short of revolutionary, engines used for fun and chaos instead of work. This, in an age before airplanes, cars and lawsuits. Coney was the spawning ground for amusement parks. Tilyou’s Steeplechase racetrack was soon duplicated at a half-dozen other parks.

America’s first roller coaster was the invention of LaMarcus A. Thompson. His 6-mph Switchback Railway, on Coney Island, was a popular success in 1884. Passengers rolled down a track, filed up a stairway while the car was hoisted to a second level of track, reloaded, then rolled back down. The next modification arose when an inventor joined the upper and lower track portions with a loop. A moving chain-lift was installed for a third coaster—a chilling effect still in use today.

Coasters evolved left and right on Coney. The Flip-Flap hurt too many people’s necks, and became obsolete after two years. The Leap Frog of 1904 used two cars coasting toward each other—at the fatal moment of impact, one scuttled over the other’s back. The Virginia Reel used circular cars that revolved during their descent.

Then engineers figured that an ellipse, rather than a perfectly circular loop, could prevent neck injuries. The Loop the Loop, on West 10th Street, perfected the roller coaster philosophy: it must seem at once totally lethal and absolutely safe.

Coasters became the bread-and-butter attractions of amusement parks, with their combination of thrills and intimacy. Jolting couples together on the turns, but with just the right kind of jolt. These nuances, these double dips and drops were varied each year for improvement. But there is no telling how many romantic evenings were soured by vomiting episodes, after a Tornado ride on a belly full of Coney Island red hots.

LaMarcus A. Thompson continued his coaster innovations in Atlantic City. Tilyou brought him back where he built the $40,000 Pikes Peak on Surf Avenue in Brooklyn. Here, the roller coaster tripped switches that illuminated scenes within caves and tunnels. But the most dangerous coaster was the Rough Riders, named after Teddy Roosevelt’s men. Motormen in Spanish-American War uniforms ran full throttle on steep downgrades and sharp curves. In 1910, two cars tore loose, sailing 16 people 60 feet in the air. Four died.

Scott Russo Archive

Black Cracker On the Air

2010-05-13T04:46:00.000-07:00

Hear Josh on The Allan Handelman Show this Friday, May 14th. 101.1 WZTK, North Carolina.

Josh will be talking Black Cracker starting around 5:20 pm Eastern time.

Click the WZTK streaming link below to listen live on Friday:

http://player.streamtheworld.com/liveplayer.php?CALLSIGN=WZTKFM

Coney Island (Part I)

2010-05-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t until a century after its creation that Coney Island received its literary due in books and documentaries, most notably through Kevin Baker (Dreamland, the book) and Ric Burns (Coney Island, the doc, from PBS’s American Experience series). I was never able to get a firm hand on the subject, but wrote a few rudimentary, half-assed attempts. One was a commissioned overview for a filmmaker in the 1980s. He intended to use this as narration weaving throughout a documentary. I don’t recall his name, or even know if the doc was finished or released.

Scott Russo Archive

No world’s fair or exposition of the 19th Century ever approached what was to evolve upon Coney Island. On this holy land, the hot dog and the roller coaster was born. Mass ocean bathing was first practiced. Coney Island prophesied the 20th Century to come—trips to the moon, Mars, world wars, electric trains. Battlefield recreations and naval armadas employed thousands of extras, and would be financially impossible to stage today. Like the lost city of Atlantis, it is hard to believe the ruins that exist today were once so magnificent.

The locale was a sandy five-mile stretch at the foot of Brooklyn. In the 1870s, three huge Victorian hotels were built by the ocean shore. Coney Island became the summer resort for Manhattan’s high society, for stars of stage and sports. The rich built mansions. There were huge garden-filled restaurants with Sousa bands, one of which served draft champagne instead of beer. Three first-class racetracks went up. There were hopes Coney would become the new Newport.

But Coney also attracted crooks, pickpockets, con men and whores. They felt Coney was their rightful place, amid illegal gambling joints and knock-out drop saloons. A 34-room hotel and dance hall, in the shape of a 150-foot elephant, became the hot spot for fornication.

By 1890, clergy referred to it as “Sodom by the Sea,” one of several nicknames that would stick for decades. An 1893 article in the sanctimonious New York Times declared it a Brooklyn outgrowth of New York’s crooked Boss Tweed administration. “Scenes that Shock and Disgust,” read the cover story, maintaining Coney Island yearned for more victims to make drunk and rob.

The father of Coney Island, George C. Tilyou, moved there in 1865, at the age of three. His parents established the Surf House, which sold beer and rented bathing suits. A seaside huckster, Tilyou commissioned his own Ferris wheel in 1894. Though it was half the size of the one at the Chicago World’s Fair, created by George Ferris, he claimed it as the world’s largest.

Coney Island’s corruption thrived under the iron-fist rule of John Y. McKane, a politician who stunted Tilyou’s efforts running a seaside theater. When the reform movement sent McKane to Sing Sing, Tilyou became the Island’s guiding force. Next to the elephant-shaped hotel was Sea Lion Park, featuring a water slide into a fake lagoon called Shoot the Chutes. Tilyou believed the middle-class was repelled by Coney’s criminal reputation. Thus, competing with Sea Lion, he built an enclosed 15-acre amusement park, keeping the 19th Century riff-raff out. His attraction to outdo the Chutes was an imported English ride that simulated a horse race.

Steeplechase was christened in 1897, named after its wooden horse ride that rang around the park on track. And thus, like Times Square, another crime-ridden New York vicinity grew into glory—then would fall into slums at the end of its long epoch.

Steeplechase remained the soul of Coney Island for 69 years. George C. Tilyou’s Funny Place, as it was known, was packaged for respectable, law-abiding citizens. Nevertheless, it devised devious methods for young men and women’s bodies to entwine. Skirts were blown up by air gushers in the floor, revealing ankles and pantaloons—a forbidden sight. The Oceanside entrance made visitors walk through the Barrel of Love, a 10-by-30 foot polished wooden drum that spun unsuspecting strangers—hopefully of the opposite sex—into suggestive contact.

A one-price ticket was printed—25-cents for 25 attractions. People saw themselves in distorted mirrors, lost control of their muscles on the Human Roulette Wheel, the Whirlpool, the Human Pool Table. Men held tight to women’s waists on the Steeplechase race, shattering social mores of the Victorian age. The exit led through a labyrinth onto the “Insanitarium” stage. Clowns and dwarves cackled as they pulled levers delivering shocks and air bursts. Couples limped past dancing card decks, swaying barrels, heaving floor patches. Staircases flattened into slides. A roaring crowd of those who went before watched their humility. Then they would join the audience, laughing at others, their inhibitions loosened by machine-age technology.

Actual parking tag received at Coney during my childhood

The Steeplechase logo—which many mistook for Tilyou’s mug—was a demonic face leering out at summer crowds for 70 years. His hair parted center, winging out to both sides. The mouth smiled obscenely over 33 teeth. One critic called it “the most incredibly vulgar trademark ever seen.”

Coney Island’s exploits were motivated by entrepreneurial one-upmanship. Its creators were architectural visionaries. The Trip to the Moon appeared at the 1901 Pan-American Expo in Buffalo, New York, a cyclorama spaceship voyage. Visitors disembarked on the lunar surface to be given green cheese by dancing moon maidens and giants. Its creators, Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy, were invited by Tilyou to relocate at Steeplechase. Following its success during the 1902 season, Thompson & Dundy left Tilyou. They bought out Sea Lion Park and became America’s latest P.T. Barnums.

At a cost of $1-million, Coney’s second great theme park, Luna Park, was quickly built in time to open the 1903 season. According to legend, the financially drained Thompson & Dundy scrounged to borrow $22 in silver for ticket-booth change on opening day in 1903. Attending opening night were 45,000, many admitted free when the ticket booths ran out of change. The Trip to the Moon was its centerpiece, but the park was ablaze with 250,000 incandescent light bulbs. It contained strange make-believe lands and people, sculpted animals, fiery pinwheels. An Eskimo Village, a Japanese Garden, a Dutch Windmill, a trip 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Four elephants slid down water slides, in an act that would today draw the ire of animal rights activists more than the circus. Forty camels roamed the Streets of Delhi. A huge medieval castle staged a 15-minute recreation of the Johnstown flood of 1889. A tidal wave destroyed hundreds of model buildings to restage the Galveston flood of 1900. British illusionist Henry J. Pain used theatrical technology for the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and resulting fall of Pompeii, beneath streams of pyrotechnic magnesium powder. Luna Park was described as Eden, an electric Baghdad as Aladdin never dreamed. “Oriental orgasmic,” according to one astute art critic.

Audiences sat in a battery that was supposedly guarding New York harbor. They watched patriotically as the Navy sunk the combined fleets of Germany, France, Britain and Spain. This was before America became a world power. New disasters were ushered in as nature created them. On opening day of one season, a full-scale battle was reenacted with actual British veterans of the South African Boer Wars. A thousand troops took the field. Salaries for the 600 regular soldiers were too prohibitive, so the mock battle ceased after one season.

Luna Park cleared a $600,000 profit during its first season—astronomical in 1903. This attracted a third major player in Coney Island’s development. Realtor and sometime state senator Paul Reynolds formed an investment group to build a third park.

Scott Russo Archive

Josh's Lost New York

2010-05-05T00:03:00.000-07:00

Al Goldstein's bar mitzvah, Brooklyn, 1949. He'd later wear the same suit for his first hooker.

(from I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life)

© 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

Thunder Road Bites the Dust

2010-05-03T00:02:00.000-07:00

Originally appeared as “The Saga of Jacksboro Highway,” in Gallery, March 1989

Driving up the bend of Jacksboro Highway, retired cowpokes squint their eyes upon a familiar landscape unchanged in 50 years. It is the sepia-toned Massey’s 21 Club and the Rockwood Motel, a 1930s motor lodge, surrounded by green hills and bathed in a massive horizon. Old farmers and former Fort Worth rodeo cowboys mosey on in around happy hour. This is the same bar they’ve been drinking at since they were young and wild, when Jacksboro Highway was known as “Thunder Road”—a 16-mile stretch between Fort Worth and Azle, Texas.

Jacksboro Highway attracted the meanest white people in all of Texas. Outlaws hid there and gangsters flourished within the 40-odd honky-tonk beer joints and lavish nightclubs. The 16-mile stream of neon offered a proliferation of illegal slot machines, backroom gambling, whores, dope, booze and constant shootouts.

By 1990 the Highway Department will be razing Massey’s 21 Club, along with most of the remaining old honky-tonks along the Jax.

Massey’s was one of the safer spots. Proprietor Bobby Sitton promised his father-in-law, Hubert Massey, he’d keep the club looking the same as it did in the 1930s. He’s kept his promise.

“I really don’t know why,” says Bobby, “but back in those days there was a lot of mean people around. ’Course, most of ’em all been thinned out. Stabbed to death, car wrecks, shot, dynamited or still in the pen from back in the old days. Very few of ’em just flat died.”

Sitton, 56, grew up on the Jax, and talks friendly as apple pie. Yet he’s bowlegged and battle-scarred, with knife scars across the belly. He’s been shot twice in local bars and he's “got stitches on top of stitches” across his head, where countless beer bottles have crashed.

“When you own a club on the Jacksboro, you may be the owner, but you’re always the bouncer,” says Sitton. His hands seem constructed like large, puffy fists. He scratches his head, bewildered as to why Jacksboro was more violent than other places on Earth.

“When we were growing up out here, it just seemed like the thing to do was fighting. Mostly just good ol’ fist fighting, no guns or knives. Worst thing was a beer bottle on the head. Get out there, pick a fight, have a good knockdown drag-out. I’ve been beat on all my life.”

The most troublesome problem Bobby now faces is the loss of his club and the old motel behind it, The Rockwood. Massey’s rose from the base of a streetcar diner in 1934. It is like a western version of Sardi’s on Broadway, deserving of landmark status. Red leather bar stools are built into the counter. Old silver beer refrigerators align the tender’s side of the bar. The seating booths are made of cozy red leather, each fitted with a Seeburg Consolette jukebox. Massey’s water still comes from a well dug out by Bobby’s father-in-law. (“Best well water you ever drunk in your life,” Sitton proudly points out.) His handsome mother-in-law, with a regal beehive, lends class to the joint, bantering with old customers at the bar. Today, she speaks with Billy Ray Robinson, owner of the Arabian-baroque Caravan Motel up on the corner, which his daddy and uncle built. He’ll lose his land to the highway, too.

You expect Clark Gable to swagger in for a cup o’ Joe; a gum-snappin’ Jean Harlow to strut over and jot down your Old Bushmills order on a pad. Like most owners of rough-and-tumble joints, Bobby Sitton will sooner stress his gentle nature. His role model in the art of behaving like a gentleman was Hubert Massey, whose family also founded Fort Worth’s greatest chicken-fried steak restaurant on Eighth Avenue.

“A genuine statesman and gentleman,” says Bobby, who watched his father-in-law offer countless gangsters a free drink with the condition they “call it a day and leave.”

“This club is a family place, where ladies wear dresses and dance to the old-fashioned waltz. We don’t allow any known criminals, prostitutes or dope dealers to come in here.”

On weekends, Massey’s features country-and-Western dancing to the seasoned Jacksboro Highway Band. Leon Short, the 52-year-old lead singer, is the great-great grandson of Luke Short, who gunned down Marshall Longhair Jim Courtright (a former outlaw himself) outside the White Elephant Saloon on Hell’s Half Acre in Fort Worth, about two miles from the saloon’s current location. “Blasted off the sheriff's thumb,” says Bobby, as if he saw it, “so he couldn't shoot—then blew him away.”

One of the legendary survivors of the old Jax, Cliff Helton, sits at the bar. There’s a 50-year-old photo of Cliff by the cash register. He's out on the Highway, posing alongside his freshly crashed 1936 Ford, wearing a Great Gatsby suit and a movie-star smile. Folks used to refer to Cliff as the Mayor of Jacksboro Highway. He owned dozens of joints, bars, bar-B-Q’s. He stood shotgun over them all, and shot off many a kneecap. They say he gambled most every one away at the flip of a card. As “one of the survivors,” now in his seventies, Cliff doesn’t necessarily like to talk about the old days.

“He’s mellowed some,” says one old-timer at the bar, “but you don’t wanna fool with him. You push him in the corner, do something bad, he gonna do it back worse.”

Jacksboro Highway’s gang warfare of the 1950s created a situation where most of the gangsters shot themselves into extinction. Dozens received gangland executions, their bodies strewn about narrow graves by Lake Worth. Every night, some fool would walk into a bar and announce he was the “toughest man in Texas,” and wait for someone to prove him wrong.

But the professional tough guys had names like Cecil Green, who was shot by gunmen in a Jacksboro nightspot while he counted an extortion haul. Sitting with him was Tincy Eggleston, who escaped the bullet hail. Tincy later had his head blown off by Gene Paul Norris, over robbery money from an alleged Cuban weapons deal. One of the last heavies to go, Norris was gunned down in 1957 by an army of Texas Rangers, state troopers and Fort Worth cops. They chased him into a field after he robbed the Carswell Air Force Base payroll.

The regulars at the last honky-tonks on the Jax still speak quietly the names of those gangsters, 25 years after the last of them were killed. But they can’t figure why the highway is just now being “cleaned up,” two decades later.

The gambling halls and gangster dens all died with the outlaws. But the encroaching fast-food chains that already clutter the Jax will finish off the last of the wild West. The Highway Department will swathe out an eight-lane freeway of corporate shopping malls, and plow over the remnants of Thunder Road.

They will also be eliminating a cowpoke tradition that hasn’t lost a moment from the days when the southeast corner of downtown Fort Worth was known as “Hell’s Half Acre.” It was an outlaw community unrivaled in the West. By the turn of the century there were over 80 whorehouses in business. Fannie Porter’s house of ill repute harbored the Hole in the Wall Gang (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Legend has it Bonnie and Clyde stayed in the Right Hotel on North Main Street, now called the Stockyards Hotel. In fact, the suite they are said to have slept in is named after them.

Hell’s Half Acre seemed to move onto Jacksboro Highway by the 1930s. It was still mostly prairie between downtown Fort Worth and Lake Worth. The Jacksboro was built up by the state of Texas to accommodate Carswell Air Force Base and an aircraft factory, bringing thousands of soldiers and plant workers to the area. Cops called it the “Jax Beer Highway” in the ’40s and ’50s, where blue-collar hay hands and packing-house workers got drunk, fought and sometimes killed each other. White kids with money from the Arlington suburbs scored reefers in the back alleys, at a time when marijuana was still a dark secret of Negroes and Orientals. The honky-tonks became off-limits to Carswell personnel when it became evident that cowpokes, Yankee fliers and hay hands made for volatile bedfellows.

The bouncers could usually control the fights at the good clubs. Since World War II, the Rocket Club has been peeling back its canvas roof for summer dancing under the stars. It’s now a white-washed ghost of its former self, where Mexican dances are held. The new highway will demolish it. Top Texas swing bands, including Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and The Light Crust Doughboys, made it out to the Jax to play such palaces as the Coconut Grove, the Skyliner and the Casino.

Bill Luttrell began playing the Highway that many country musicians avoided, at Hattie’s Silver Dollar in 1946: “It was a real bad place,” says the guitarist, with a hearty laugh. “Notorious for fighting. People from Azle came out there. Two women started fighting one night, then one guy tried to break ’em up and, ’course, everybody in the house jumped on him. I thought we’d never escape. We hit the window with a mike stand and crawled out. When the fight was over, we went back for our PA, which was literally destroyed.

“I played the Skyliner, the last big strip joint [which featured Dallas stripper Candy Barr], on the last night, about 20 years ago. Little Lynn was starring; she’d been part of the Jack Ruby murder trial. I don’t think the police chief much liked her coming here, ’cause they raided us that night at 10 o’clock. Took all the strippers and the club owner to jail. I went down to pick him up. This was a union club, too, so we all got paid; even the strippers were union. Then the Skyliner reopened as a dance joint. The new guy that owned it wrote everybody hot checks, including the beer company, the radio station and newspaper [that ran his] ads, even Ernest Tubb, who headlined opening night.”

The worst thing Luttrell remembers was the night a guitarist named Jimmy Garner went to sub for him at the Rockwood Lounge. “He got killed. He bumped into two mean drunks who got mad and stabbed him.”

The big neon V out on Jacksboro is a dining landmark. Vivian Courtney’s Restaurant still serves great chicken fried anything. During World War II, the establishment was called Harmon’s, and served more dinners by car hop than anywhere on the strip. Vivian took over in 1946.

She raised two daughters here, and curls an eyebrow suspiciously over Jacksboro’s myths and legends. “Nobody ever bothered us.”

“I think Mansfield Highway was just as dangerous,” drawls her husband Bill, a tall, burly Texan. “For what they say happened on this highway, they coulda went to the moon. All I remember is what I did.”

The Courtneys’ restaurant will likely lose its locale when the freeway is built. They’re not particularly sentimental and feel too old to fight it.

“Time marches on,” says Bill, pointing out that 60 local chain-type businesses signed up in support of the new highway. “When the Highway Department wants our land, they’ll take it.”

“All I'm doin’ is settin’ and wonderin’,” says Inez, owner of the Inez 50-50 Club, a country-and-Western bar with hot live music. “They didn’t build these new K-marts and Jack-In-The-Boxes to be torn down,” she observes. Touring the strip by car, she points out how all the new fast-food stores seem strategically set more than 36 feet off the road, within legal limits to remain if a freeway cuts up the middle. If the highway goes south, they’ll have to cut down K-Mart, bigger than a football field, which seems unlikely. If they route around north, they’ll steer traffic away, leaving Inez’ club in a back-road shadow. If they cut down the middle, they’ll have to buy her out at “fair market prices” and raze the club.

“Once they build the new highway, business’ll probably be good for a year. Then all these little neighborhood places—people gonna quit comin’, they’ll forget, they’ll hate to get off the highway, it’ll be dangerous. You know how it goes.”

Inez has been on the highway since her youth. Still sexy at 70, she’s on the lookout for a 10th husband. “You can’t be married and run a club. You gotta marry the club.

“I’ve been up and down the road,” she says, steering her luxury car past ghost locations. She points to an empty lot: “That’s where Tincy Eggleston’s gang used to hang out, a bad bunch. They blowed it up, that’s why it’s not there anymore. I guess they’re all pretty near dead, but I don’t like to say anything ’cause they have families.

“That was the Sweet Two Two Five. . . . Up on the hill was the Chateau. After the Fort Worth Stock Show, they’d all be up here at night, playing slot machines, diceboards, girls.

“Oh, I throwed Willie Nelson outta my club many a time,” she remembers, “back in ’50, ’51. He was married to a Mexican girl, and he worked at a service station with my baby boy. He didn't sing—he used to talk sad and play his guitar. Drove me crazy. I had a little old place called the Hayloft, and he’d set up there with his feet hangin’ down. Customers’d say, ‘Please get him down.’ I'd say, ‘Willie, they want you to get out.’ He’d usually go somewhere else, till they run him off, just playin’ for drinks.”

Thirty years ago, out on the Jax, a club owner could send in $12 tax per month to the state. Now, Inez explains, it’s become much harder to run a club. “I sold beer 10 cents a bottle, three for a quarter. Now for each drink I have to send 12 cents to the state. I’m audited in Austin, have to send them three thousand dollars a month.”

Like other club owners on the Jax, Inez claims she never associated or did trade with gangsters. “I have never had any serious trouble at my club. I’ve held a license 47 years, and never had a shootin’ or a cuttin’.” The main troubles Inez had were good-old knock-down drag-out fights, which could only have occurred in a time of prosperity, when the country was happier. Fighting clean was a euphoric tradition, and has gone the way of drive-ins and Buffalo nickels.

“We had lots of rodeo boys, they just loved to fight. With their fists. They were just squares, not characters, who’d get drunk and see who’s toughest. Somebody’d say he could whup anyone on the highway; next thing ya know, they’d meet up the street and make bets. Then they’d come back, buy each other beers. . . . But people won’t fight no more, you’ll get killed, they’ll get a gun and come back to blow yer head off. The honor of fighting has gone. I think it's ’cause of dope, people are more worried, can’t afford a night out anymore. They don’t fool with fighting, just leave ’em alone or they’ll kill ya.

“I’m getting old,” claims Inez. “I’d like to get out of it. It’s slowed down at the club, I don’t think there’s much goin’ on now on Jacksboro Highway. They might relocate me, but I don’t know where to go. Lord, yes, I will retire if they buy my place. Forty-seven years of this is enough.”

Bobby Sitton remembers Inez’ place as “real dangerous, still lotsa trouble.” But of Massey’s, he claims there hasn’t been a fight in several years: “And I was involved in it myself. About fifteen Irishmen come in. First time we ever had any problems with the Irish. They were filthy-mouthed, like they’d finish their beer and th’owed it behind the bar. I ordered ’em outta the place. Then one of ’em th’owed a beer in my face. Nobody th’ows no beer on me. I knocked the hell outta him, smacked him a damn good one, sent him all the way into the jukebox. All his friends got up, and it come out to quite a battle raw. I fought ’em all the way from here to the dance floor, got knocked down a few times myself. My wife jumped off the bar on about five of ’em. The bar girl called the law, and the po-lice got here quick, arrested some of ’em.”

Bobby Sitton at Oakwood Cemetery, Fort Worth, 1988

Bobby often visits the Oakwood Cemetery, “the most beautiful cemetery you ever seen.” On the short drive to Oakwood, he proudly points out the dives of yesteryear: “Used to be a place here called Lottie’s—I got shot in the arm by the bartender. We’d had a fallin’ out night before, and he didn’t serve me a beer, so I hit him over the head with a beer bottle. My fault. He shot me in the damn arm, I had to crawl out to keep him from shootin’ again. Then he come outside and still shot at me.

“And there's the old Cartwheel Club, and boy, you talk about fightin’. There was a hell hole if there ever was one. The old man who owned it, name was Grip. Well, one night he decided I needed to leave. So I started out and the sonofagun shot me through the side. I guess I wasn't leavin’ quick enough to suit him. That created a pretty good stink, ’cause I had a bunch of friends who got upset and broke all the windows out.”

Bobby steps out at Oakwood Cemetery, off the highway on Fort Worth’s North Side. This was his childhood playground. “Some of my best friends are buried here,” he laments, stepping slowly over the lumpy green earth. A German shepherd stands guard over a tombstone, his former master. Bobby says they used to hang outlaws right here at the old hanging tree, before burying them. They’d have the trial right across the river at the courthouse.

Oakwood Cemetery provides Bobby’s favorite bird’s-eye view into downtown Fort Worth, across the Trinity River. Tall smokestacks rise up behind the train tracks, where “three niggers fell when they were building ’em . . . and my best friend is buried right there. He was shot between the eyes over a woman, back in the ’50s.

“I still have some pretty good fights back at my motel, mostly with women,” Bobby admits. The Rockwood stands behind Massey’s, and is in considerably worse condition. The rooms run $12.95 per night, and each is equipped with an open space for a 1930s auto. “I do my best to keep a clean motel, but you can’t always tell if they’re prostitutes till they show their colors.

“Most of ’em white women, fight ya like a dog. I never hit a woman with my fist in my whole life. But I had one that sicced her damn dog on me. We had a knock-down, drag-out fight, she hung her fangs in my arm, almost bit it off—the woman, not the dog. Couldn’t pry her jaws off. Boy, I mean I hit her back. She hadda let go to cuss me. And when she did, we rassled outta my office into the drive, and I’ll be darned if she didn’t sic that dog on me again. Little old poodle. I drug her to the front gate and tossed her out on Jacksboro Highway.

“Well, her blouse got tore off, she didn’t have a bra on, but there wasn’t anything to see, believe me, flat chest. That tickled me. I laughed and said, ‘Lookit there!’ She had two tattoos above where’s supposed to be some female stuff, that said, ‘Have Fun.’

“‘I’ll tell you one thing, you Jacksboro Highway ho’,’ I told her, ‘you better git down the highway, or next time I’m gonna fight you like a man.’”

The old-timers left on the Jax are so folksy, it’s hard to imagine they were reared in such violent times. “Coldest Beer and Friendliest People in Texas,” reads the logo outside Massey’s 21 Club. But the last of the mom-and-pop joints along Jacksboro—as well as the rest of America—will soon be homogenized into assembly-line malls. All of what is ethnic, regional or historic will disappear in the ongoing corporate Texas chainsaw massacre, dictated by demographic surveys, not human spirit. Fort Worth presents its yearly Pioneer Days in the stockyards, but it is for tourists. The unbroken thread of the real wild West will remain on Jacksboro Highway for about a year.

“Our time’s runnin’ out,” laments Bobby Sitton, hunched over his beloved Massey’s bar. “That highway’s gonna git us.” The state will pay them a “fair market price” for the land and building. “But we’re not getting a damn thing for the loss of customers we built up for 50 years. They’re even taking the Rockwood Christian Church across the street. Used to be the old Massey home place. We sold it to the church with an understanding they’d never start a crusade against us. Now, it looks like they gonna go down the chute, too, with us.”

© 1989, 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

Josh's Lost New York

2010-04-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

I Like Ice

2010-04-26T00:02:00.000-07:00

art by Drew Friedman

An ICEBERG SLIM appreciation

This originally ran, in different form, on my associate Richard Jaccoma’s then-website, Spunk.com, in June 1997. Like my Jack Ruby and Winedale pieces, it’s appeared all over the map.

A mere 20 years ago, in the 1970s, the “canon” of Negro Lit—Black American novelists in print—seemed preposterously thin, scattered and barely represented at mainstream bookstores. A handful of chosen authors received literary knighthood, but no matter how you sliced it, James Baldwin’s lofty intellect landed squarely in the liberal white establishment. The one-hit wonders, like Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man, or Claude Brown's 1964 best seller, Manchild in the Promised Land, were grounded in the Queen's English—as was the great Richard Wright before them, whose lean, mean prose hammered home the Negro experience to generations of college Caucasians.

Iceberg Slim burst forth in 1969 as a savagely gifted storyteller, whose paperback novels sold in unprecedented numbers in the ghettos. Iceberg Slim was the nom-de-pimp of Robert Beck, whose seven books sold six million copies by the time he died in 1992, at 73. (This figure according to his publisher, Holloway House.) Beck briefly graced Tuskegee Institute’s 1930’s college rolls at the same time as did Ralph Ellison. Beck dropped out, having chosen his calling—for which Tuskegee offered no degree. Years later, had it come to a streetfight of words, Iceberg’s “masterworks of pimp profanity” could have cut down Ellison’s milquetoast prose in a Harlem minute.

He wrote flagrantly in the pre-Ebonics lingo of Chicago’s South Side—which even today repels the upwardly mobile Black middle class. Iceberg’s books contain glossaries of underworld Negro slang that went out with minstrel shows and burnt cork blackface. The Norton Anthology of Black American Literature—newly christened by Black Harvard professors proclaiming a breakthrough, state-of-the-art “canon”—doesn't even mention his name in its vast index.

Like the painter Grandma Moses, Iceberg Slim was reborn an artist after age 40. His third, and harshest prison sentence—10 months in steel solitary at the Cook County House of Corrections—finally crushed the pimp right out of him. Vilifying past predatory values, he exorcised his demons into folklore, leaving a seven-book legacy. Pimp: The Story of My Life, contained bookend warnings against the life. But Iceberg’s masterpiece only bolstered pimp liberation amidst the blaxploitation movie craze. In Times Square, for instance, a hundred fur-coated Superflys lorded over a thousand streetwalkers, taking renegade control of 8th Avenue. For them, Pimp declassified the sorcery of whore control, became a textbook for wannabes, and lent ethnic pride to the hideous profession.

Pimp still holds as perhaps the greatest chronicle ever written on male-female relations. In the flush of literary success, white feminist-journalist types sought out interviews like intellectual groupies. Pimp philosophy, Iceberg believed, might be adapted to mainstream relationships.

“My theory is that some quantum of pimp in every man would perhaps enhance his approach to women,” he told the Washington Post. “Because I think it’s a truism that women gravitate to a man who can at least flash transient evidence of heelism. . . Women are prone to masochism, anyway. I think if you are able to manufacture a bit of ‘heelism’ in your nature and give them a sense of insecurity as to whether some voluptuous rival might come along and steal you, then you are a treasured jewel.”

The thrill, Iceberg told the L.A. Free Press, came during youth, where he described “a vacuum that is filled by the joy of learning the intricacies of being a pimp. . . For really, what is the bedrock of all male aspiration, if it isn’t cunt and money? Now here the pimp, what has he got? All kinds of beautiful girls, who bring him cunt and money. Kiss and suck and love him. . . .on the surface, of course, because beneath, they really pray for his ruin.”

An underlying trait common to career pimps, Iceberg found, was a hatred of mother. “I've known several dozen, in fact, that were dumped into trash bins when they were. . . only four or five days old.”

Pimping was a black man's hustle—Iceberg claimed he never saw a white player in his league. Whites were rare, he explained, “Because there’s so many other areas of chicanery, which are much more lucrative, that are open to white fellows.” Iceberg reffered to white women, in the historical sense, of course, as “alabaster supercunts.”

Black pimps of yore (denied entry into the corporate death culture they enjoy today) chose to use their superior intellect to enslave women, avoiding the sucker’s work-a-day world. But controlling 10 women at a time could really fray a fellow’s nerves. One must summon endless schemes and deceptions to stay one step ahead of his treacherous charges: “A pimp is happy when his whores giggle,” Iceberg wrote. “He knows they are still asleep.”

One wrong turn, and Candy Man Dan could “blow whoreless.”

Iceberg told the Washington Post he retired from the life at age 42 “because I was old. I did not want to be teased, tormented and brutalized by young whores.” Girls raised on TV, brainwashed by its tease of material wealth, could no longer fall for the cheap glamour once utilized by Iceberg’s generation of pimps. (In those days, a pimp could tack upon his hotel walls yard rolls of satin from the fabric store, and dazzle the bitches.)

At the age of 55, with four young children, he said, “Now my ambition is to be as good a father as I was a pimp.” Anxious to feed those four hungry beaks, as well as cushion their future, the middle-aged dad wrote, gave lectures and stayed square. It was tough adjusting from Big Daddy to just plain daddy. At first, his infant daughters were like “little whores,” he said. He had a morbid fear of being kissed by them, and would only pick up his kids with their backs toward him. Through grit and determination, and the aid of his new wife, Iceberg eventually fit in—comfortably niched in Los Angeles halfway between Ward and Eldridge Cleaver.

Iceberg Slim’s second novel, Trick Baby, abounds with the preposterous racial torments that Blacks and whites alike once rained upon the poor mulatto or octoroon. Any such person, it was once assumed in the ghetto, must surely be the offspring of a black prostitute and a white trick; thus the title Trick Baby (talk about your snap judgments!).

Trick Baby is the story of his prison mate, the great Chicago con man Johnny O’Brien, of Irish-African blood—known as “White Folks” to his friends, “Trick Baby” to his enemies. Looking like the twin of Errol Flynn, Folks could have entered white society, but spent his early career on Chicago’s South Side, preferring to flimflam his own people.

Iceberg’s prose did indeed grow loftier in sophistication as his success increased. One of the journalistic sketches collected in The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim, shows him humbled before the Black Panthers:

“Nigger, you kicked black women in the ass for bread. How many you got now?” comes a young Panther. Rather than chop him down with his “still-remembered masterworks of pimp profanity,” Iceberg admits to himself that the Panthers are “superior to that older generation of cowards, of which I am part.” He leaves with “genuine tears rolling down my joyous old nigger cheeks.”

After Iceberg Slim became the American ghetto’s best-selling author, he released a masterful performance album of poetry called Reflections in the early ’70s. The timbre and meter of his voice is so hypnotic, it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how he sweet-talked hundreds of wavering females into the world’s oldest profession. Such a demonstration, in fact, is reenacted for your listening pleasure on the opening vignette, “The Fall.”

We can only speculate that Iceberg’s literary education in prison included the discovery of poet Robert W. Service, whose meter he emulates. Service wrote doggerel epics at the turn of the century, like “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” As Service wrote of what he knew—the Klondike and the Gold Rush—so did Iceberg write what he knew, using the form made popular by Service.

Holloway House, the independent Black publishing group in Los Angeles, which has published Iceberg exclusively in paperback, since 1969, features Iceberg’s seven novels as its flagship titles. Holloway spokesman Mitchell Neal brazenly told me that books by Black authors were unavailable during the ’60s—not only dismissing black establishment writers of the era, but poets (Leroi Jones), playwrights (Ed Bullins, Melvin Van Peebles), show-biz bios (Sammy Davis’ Yes I Can!, Pigmeat Markham’s Here Come Da Judge!) and numerous political manifestos. But he was not far off the mark, as bookstores had not yet initiated the “African-American” section. (Which smacks of segregation, and begs the question, why not have a White People section? Or add a Colored Only water fountain to the African-American aisle?)

In the 1970s, Holloway represented an alternative Black literature in paperback—Iceberg Slim as its flagship author, followed by the oeuvres of Donald Goines (16 titles), Odie Hawkins (16 titles), Joe Nazel (10 titles), Rae Shawn Stewart (five titles), and a spectrum of black westerns, mysteries, crime sagas, biographies. A half-dozen different pimp memoirs, for instance, followed on the heels of Iceberg—who remains America's true pimp-laureate.

art by Drew Friedman

© 1997, 2010 Josh Alan Friedman

From Pimp: The Story of My Life

A good pimp doesn’t get paid for screwing. He gets his pay-off for always having the right thing to say to a whore right on lightning tap. I knew my four whores were flapping their ears to get my reaction to this beautiful bitch. A pimp with an overly fine bitch in his stable has to keep his game tight. Whores constantly probe for weakness in a pimp.

I fitted a scary mask on my face and said, in a low, deadly voice, “Bitch, are you insane? No bitch in this family calls any shots or muscles me to do anything. Now take your stinking yellow ass upstairs to a bath and some shut-eye. Get in the street at noon like I told you.”

The bitch just stood there. Her eyes slitted in anger. I could sense she was game to play the string out right there in the street before my whores. If I had been ten-years dumber I would have leaped out of the ‘Hog’ and broken her jaw, and put my foot in her ass. The joint was too fresh in my mind.

I knew the bitch was trying to booby-trap me when she spat out her invitation. “Come on, kick my ass. What the hell do I need a man I only see when he comes to get his money? I am sick of it all. I don’t dig stables and never will. I know I’m the new bitch who has to prove herself. Well Goddamnit, I am sick of this shit. I'm cutting out.”

She stopped for air and lit a cigarette. I was going to blast her ass off when she finished. I just sat there staring at her.

Then she went on, “I have turned more tricks in the three months I have been with you than in the whole two years with Paul. My pussy stays sore and swollen. Do I get my ass kicked before I split? If so, kick it now because I’m going back to Providence on the next thing smoking.”

She was young, fast with trick appeal galore. She was a pimp’s dream and she knew it. She had tested me with her beef. She was laying back for a sucker response.

I disappointed her with my cold overlay. I could see her wilt as I said in an icy voice. “Listen square-ass bitch, I have never had a whore I couldn’t do without. I celebrate, Bitch, when a whore leaves me. It gives some worthy bitch a chance to take her place and be a star. You scurvy Bitch, if I shit in your face, you gotta love it and open your mouth wide.”

The rollers cruised by in a squad car. I flashed a sucker smile on my face. I cooled it until they passed. Kim was rooted there wincing under the blizzard.

I went on ruthlessly, “Bitch, you are nothing but a funky zero. Before me you had one chili chump with no rep. Nobody except his mother ever heard of the bastard. Yes, Bitch, I’ll be back this morning to put your phony ass on the train.”

I rocketed away from the curb. In the rear-view mirror, I saw Kim walk slowly into the hotel. Her shoulders were slumped. Until I dropped the last whore off you could have heard a mosquito crapping on the moon. I had tested out for them, “solid ice.”

I went back for Kim. She was packed and silent. On the way to the station, I riffled the pages in that pimp’s book in my head. I searched for an angle to hold her without kissing her ass.

I couldn’t find a line in it for an out like that. As it turned out the bitch was testing and bluffing right down the line.

We had pulled into the station parking lot when the bitch fell to pieces. Her eyes were misty when she yelped, “Daddy, are you really going to let me split? Daddy, I love you.”

I started the prat action to cinch her when I said, “Bitch, I don’t want a whore with rabbit in her. I want a bitch who wants me for life. You have got to go. After that bullshit earlier this morning, you are not that bitch.”

That prat butchered her. She collapsed into my lap crying and begging to stay. I had a theory about splitting whores. They seldom split without a bankroll.

So, I cracked on her, “Give me that scratch you held out and maybe I'll give you another chance.”

Sure enough she reached into her bosom. She drew out close to five bills and handed it to me. No pimp with a brain in his head cuts loose a young beautiful whore with lots of mileage left in her. I let her come back.

Josh's Lost New York

2010-04-21T00:03:00.000-07:00