“The hell with all this smorgasbord shish kebab crap”, said Bugsy Segal, the former bully mobster of Murder Inc., the Livonia Avenue hoods striving to take over the East New Yorkunderworld from Marlon Brando’s Sicilian “Godfathers”.
II
Pounding his chest, like a campaigner for the Mayoralty of the city that never sleeps. “I am the “Phantom of the Opera”
Forty five big ones a seat….. Broadway’s longest show,surviving our minor planet’s war poverty and disease.
Bugsy,” kvetched”, offering his arm to Ruthie, the Brooklyn College music librarian’s aide de camp ,the two strolling from the subway, Bugsy showing a side of his nature that Meyer Lansky, Al “Bummy” Davis, a Golden Glovecontender)……..had never seen in the wars that stretched to the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island when a human (Abe Reles’s?)was thrown from the pent t house to Surf Avenue below as though it was a body from the Cyclone or the parachute jump, doting the father’s landscape of Donald Trump.
Ill
When we first met Bugsy, it was at the Brownsville warehouse where the soda bottles were stored….contained in their bottled menagerie long before Tennessee William’s own “Glass Menagerie”
“A nickel a pickle” was our entry into the marketplace: the reality scene was East Flatbush, several subway stops from the warehouse and where Bugsy prove d to be Ruth of the Brooklyn College’s music library staff and the Luna Park poster as one got off the elevator to those hallowed scores of Robert (Clara’s Shuman’s genius composing hubby) and Stalin’s secret sorcerer, Dimitre Shostakovich.
If George Gershwin created his data base at Tin Pan Alley, Major Fenton scanned his lungs out on those WPA red brickpublic servants. In their overalls: garbed with their hammers, saws, pail of nails. The cement trucks: their rolling masses of cement, pouring out their thickening mustard or ketchup..
Depending on how one sees it flow into the wheel barrow.
“Get your pepsi, coke, cream, root beer. Seven up, Dr Peppersasper… orange . A nickel a pickle.”
A nickel a pickle…”Come and get it”” log before Edward Arnold honed his MGM stuff to the dust bowl denizens of the early 200th century, trying to find their raunchy selves after Herbert Hoover’s speech writers mesmerized them, their gullibility into believing in his lines.
“A chicken in every pot”, proved an empty and self serving fog horn. A lot of sound and fury out on the prairies…. Henry Fonda’s Jane Darwell “Grapes of Wrath”( Brooklyn born John Steinbeck)
lV
In the same motion as far as a crow flies, on Church Avenue “They made me a Criminal” was the titled marquee at the Waldorf movie. Studying the Warner Brothers (Jack L, later to meet in tennis doubles) lobbied posters. John Garfield, (akaGarfinkle) Joan Caulfield, no relation to Salinger’s Holden (“Catcher in the Rye”)
Munching a frozen milky way, Major Fenton joined the matineeeight nine ten year old innocents, awaiting the rise and fall of an actor in his persona named John Garfield aka Julie Garfinkle.
But like the 6th grade spelling bees and the birthday parties: spin the bottle, put the tail on the donkey’s tail blindfolded.
The female of the species to be emancipated decades later…..two wars, ‘Nam.
However “a nickel a pickle “was beholden to T.S. Eliot’s dustpan . Major Fenton’s wired hair terrier pup gave him a bacterial germ: an unabated typhoid fever that ran to 106 degrees and a 30 day come at Beth El hospital on Linden Boulevard. (Brookdale.edu )
Given up forever, a last minute blood transfusion by his Uncle Phil of Bensonhurst , gave him a new lease on life. He opened his ten year old blues……..
The City that never sleeps, August 22, 2013
