"The Chinese were very, very good at what they did whether it was food or laundry."

 An excerpt from STAND-UP GUY by Laurie Brown.

Of course regular people lived in Bensonhurst too. Families, wives, kids. Goomars, goomars were girlfriends, shit man, yeah. Most of them guys had doubles, triples. If they were married they’d have a goomar, a side gig. They were all a part of Bensonhurst. Gangsters normally don’t like to leave the area where they were born. A certain breed, at that time, was living there. All the businesses were owned mostly by Italian people, except maybe the Chinese laundry. You bring your shirts to the Chink and they do a good job. My father used to do it. Everybody used to bring their clothes to the Chinese laundry. They do a great job, they come out perfect. The white shirts all pressed and everything. The Chinese were very, very good at what they did whether it was food or laundry.  Besides Italian foods and fish and all the rest, Chinese was one of my favorites.

I loved the diners too. Most of them were open twenty-four hours. So you’re doing business twenty-four hours a day. You could get breakfast twenty-four hours a day. You could get lunch twenty-four hours a day. You can get dinner any time. Most of the time they’d have lunch specials that you couldn’t get any time, or dinner specials, but the menu itself you could get twenty-four hours a day. That was the best thing about it. You could end your day at two o’clock in the afternoon and get ham and eggs, you know? Or sausage and pancakes. They’d make them twenty-four hours a day. In Brooklyn every section has a couple of diners.

The Cadillac Diner in Farmingdale was one of my favorites. The Empress Diner was another one in Farmingdale. And then there was The Olympia Diner out on the Island, it was a big one. Most of these places, back before I left, were making extensions onto them and had bars in them. All these diners came apart. You build your foundation, you run your electric, you run your plumbing and then you stick the diner on top of it all. Everything plugs in. It’s like a trailer and it’s built in sections. You get the kitchen section, you get the counter section, you get the bar section, you get the dining room section. You can get just a couple sections then add on. They come with booths, they come with counters, they come with chairs. I saw them put together all the time, all the time. I wanted to get involved in it. I thought it was a damn good business because I ate in them all the time. I never cooked when I was younger, I cooked when I got older.

See, the thing with a diner is a lot of them cook homemade food. You know, Greek food like shish-kabob or rice. Fresh vegetables, homemade soups. Very healthy. It wouldn’t be a fast-food type place. Very healthy and very reasonable. Very reasonable.

I liked, I loved, steaks, shish-kabob and the fish. Greeks are excellent with fish. I ate loads of fish in diners. Well, Greece is all fish, fishing is their main thing. I had many a ham steak. Nice and thick. Pineapple juice all over it. Oh, yeah. Tasty. I’d get a ham steak and eggs. See I didn’t like that thin ham, I liked the ham steak.

And I liked the Jewish deli. There were many of them and all of them had good food. You know, a little too rich for me sometimes, the meat, but good.

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Lambeau Field v. The Rams

Last week I made a pilgrimage to Lambeau Field to pay homage and try to learn how to be a better fan.

I am a Rams fan and have been for about four years now. I started out devoted, stalker-ish even, and then became passionate and then became committed and recently became resigned. I thought maybe there was something wrong with me, us, the fan base, like maybe we didn't inspire. I mean we did boo them off the field three or four times last year. Not that they didn't deserve it. 

There are some Rams SuperFans: #1 Rams Fan - a big guy in full uniform. The Elvis Guy. Rampage's mother. A few face painters, a few more horn wearers. Lots of jerseys... but, St. Louis, c'mon...leave the Cardinal hats at home, okay? Be a Rams fan. Buy a Rams hat. No one in Green Bay would even think of wearing non-Packer sportswear to Lambeau. How ridiculous! I asked random people I met around Green Bay if they were Packer fans and everyone was and one guy asked "What else is there?". I loved that. 

There are a few houses that have back yards that sit directly across from the stadium. These houses have things like above the garage, glassed in porches with windows that have the Green Bay logo beautifully etched in them. One guy had a huge replica of the Lombardi trophy, professionally lit, installed in his backyard. He also had what looked like a Lambeau artifact old-school turnstile that went from his yard out to the crosswalk that led you to the Lambeau parking lot. Interestingly, this property was for sale.

Fans are welcomed with open arms at Lambeau Field even in the dead of the week in the dead of the summer. That place was buzzing. Tours every half hour. Curly's Pub right upstairs. Huge, gorgeous atrium with yard lines continuing in right from the field. And then...glowing like the sun itself...was the Packer Pro Shop. And they had everything. Branded Tupperware? Yes. A full-sized yet portable green and gold tailgating tikibar with stools, banners, a keg-looking thing, glass wear...you get the picture...? Yep. Ladies unmentionables? Yes. And stacks and stacks and one truck bed full of cheese heads. $17.95 ea. It was beautiful and everything was excellent quality. Who wouldn't want one of everything? And I'm not even a Packer fan. Except I sorta am one now.

The point is, the Green Bay Packers nurture their fan base. They welcome them, they show them around, they feed them and then they provide them with anything they want to show their commitment to the green and gold. I mean you have to pay for it but still.

Compare: the Edward Jones Dome is a warehouse. Here's the boat show, here's a car show, here are Rams games. All the same. The food: Meh. Let's just say the Rams have the softest hotdogs in the NFL and then let's just leave it alone. There are no tours of the EJD. The merch: Limp shirts hung on random fixtures found in the back. Glass cases so badly scratched you can't even see the tired and depressed items inside. I swear to God last year I saw some Greatest Show on Turf stuff in one of those cases. Hello 1999.

I went to Lambeau Field to learn to be a better fan but I came away realizing that the Rams organization doesn't really care if I'm a better fan or even if I'm a fan at all. They don't care that people are wearing Cardinals caps to their games because they don't really offer them any reason not to. They don't think the fans need a nicer stadium, or better food or fun team gear. What fans? And that's when it hit me: they must be leaving St. Louis because they aren't doing a thing to build a fan base here or really any loyalty of any kind. They can gather up these players and their helmets and move them anywhere. 

So I'm preparing myself and I'm encouraging my fellow fans to do the same. Start following another team now because the Rams are going to be gone and there's going to be a void in your life. I'm liking the Packers.

Nicky Limousine

Nicky Limousine

This guy, Nicky Limousine, he wasn’t a business associate, he was a friend. Him and me liked each other and got to be buddies and we partied together a lot. Nicky’s family was from Sicily and a lot of his family was connected but Nicky was just a drug addict and a fuck-up. They never really let him get involved because he was a fuck-up, but he was a good friend of mine. Everyone accepted him in the neighborhood because he was there, you know, but he wasn’t a gangster’s dream.

So this is while I was still living in Brooklyn in the apartment by the railroad tracks. I knew Nicky Limousine from the Sixteenth Avenue Car Service. He used to come in all the time and talk to friends of his in there and I always wondered who this guy was. He worked for the car service before I got there but by the time I met him he was already driving limos. He worked for them driving the limousines, his family was limousines and eventually he bought his own. That was his deal, he just loved limousines. We used to go out in his limousines all the time. Most of us called him Nicky Limousine but Nick the Beard used to call him Nicky Pervert.  Nicky was the type who knew all kinds of weirdos. He fixed me up with this one girl who I didn’t know it at the time but she was a transvestite. She had the operation and got her pee pee chopped off and everything. Robin, Roberta, something like that. Nicky Limousine introduced us. His cousin knew her and he was going out with a gal who was friends with her that worked in her hair salon. She owned her own hair salon with something like a dozen operators in there and she had a lot of money.

She was very pretty for a guy. Her breasts, you couldn’t even tell. Her breasts were hormonally done, you know. A little silicon in there maybe, I don’t know. She was white, white Italian. We could still have intercourse, she would just have to lube herself up real good before. But I’d had so much sex in my life, this was in the late seventies now, and I knew the difference between a real pussy and a fake pussy, you know. But it was okay.

We dated for about six months. She wanted to marry me but she got killed. She told somebody she had her dick chopped off after he fucked her and he came back with a shotgun and blew her head off. It was in all the papers. It was kind of a shock but it was part of life. I liked her, she was a real good person.

Nicky was wide open with what he did, his perversions and shit. He bragged about it all over town. He was into weird shit, anal sex, fucking fags, everything. He was a sex maniac but me and him used to have a ball together. He was the apple of my eye. When I was doing my business and I was having a slow night I’d give Nicky a call and he’d pick me up in a limo and we’d go, man. He was my best friend. Nicky was a character. He was my age, kind of a good-looking Italian guy. He looked good, he used to wear this chauffeur’s hat. He had a rough Italian face, he had pock-marks but he was a good looking guy. If he didn’t have those pock-marks I’d say he was movie star material. Kind of short but muscular, very muscular because he was a body builder. All the girls loved him. He was funny, had a good personality, everything. He was actually born there, in Bensonhurst. He was just a guy that was brought up in the neighborhood filled with that life.

Nick the Beard okayed him to be a friend of mine. He was always allowed up to the apartment until one night when he beeped his horn for me outside. He didn’t want to leave his limo out there, it was winter. And Nick wanted to kill him for beeping that horn. Nick said it draws attention to the building. And I says that’s just the way he is man, he’s got that big limo and it’s hard to park in the city. He can’t double park it, he’s afraid someone might steal it on him if he double parks, so he’ll beep the horn and I’ll come down. Nick says, well, I don’t want that to happen, blah, blah, blah. It took a long time for Nick not to be mad and during that time Nicky was barred from the building and I had to meet him somewhere else.

I think really Nick was jealous of my relationship with Nicky. I think so. He never admitted it though. The friendship I had with Nicky Limo it took time away from me with him, you know. I think it was more the friendship thing than a business thing. The only friends I had was the people I worked with other than Nicky Limo because he didn’t work with us. My people didn’t like that because they didn’t have any other friends. They hung out with each other and I broke off from that a little bit.

Like I said, Nicky Limousine was known to be a pervert, you know. Nicky was kind of a perverted type guy, liked a lot of women, you know, and I wouldn’t trust him around very young girls, you know. He held his own but he was kind of that kind of guy, you know. Lots of women, he had lots of women. I liked him, he was amusing and we were good friends. Nick didn’t really appreciate the way he lived but he was a real good guy. He had a wife, his wife was a nurse, and he had kids.

See, in the limousine game, in that neighborhood, you could say you were working twenty-four hours a day because they used them all the time. They were big Cadillac limousines. Big stretch limos. This is when they first came out, stretch limos. Black. They had bars and big seats that would go all the way around and Nicky used to keep them plush, man. Nicky and I used to go to the clubs, we went all over in the limos. One time I borrowed this guy’s mink jacket, a winter jacket in mink. A friend of mine who was my size. And I wore the mink jacket on New Year’s Eve with a black fedora and we went down to Coney Island and picked up a couple of prostitutes. And they just loved us so much that they didn’t even charge us. We partied in the limo, it had a bar and a nice sound system, there was everything in that limo. We’d pick up hookers give them a twenty-dollar bill apiece. They didn’t care. They’d ride around with us all night just to be in a limo and because we treated them real nice. We treated them like people, you know. They’d party with us and they’d do the right thing, yeah. I looked forward to having a little time off to be with him because he was my release because I was strictly business other than that, you know. We did it all in a limo, me and Nicky, it was big enough. It was like driving a house around. I’d drive it sometimes if Nicky wanted to get a piece. Then he’d drive it if I was back there. Sometimes we’d park it and we’d both be in the back fucking these girls. He’d have his limo hat on and shit. He’d only pick me up after his business was done. Nicky was good about taking care of business. Mostly rich people with airport runs, stuff like that. He’d make quite a bit of money for a short trip so he had plenty of time. He had to bring in a certain amount of money every day when he first started.

Nicky was a known drug addict with the coke. Nicky got fucked up on coke and owed us a lot of money. But when I left and went to prison and came back Nick told me, when I caught up with him after prison, that Nicky Limo paid everything back. He cleaned-up and built up his business. He said his kids were getting older and he was at home more now. We didn’t do much partying when I got out because I wasn’t living in Brooklyn anymore. I was coming there for business and that was it, then I’d go back to the Island. When I got out of prison they had a party for me and Nicky Limo was there. Same guy except now he owned the limousines. He cleaned up, stopped doing coke and was still driving limos when I left New York. He started to get successful. His brother-in-law owned the company at one time and then Nicky started to buy his own limos so he had one or two workin’ for him. Then he got a few more and he had like six when I left. He had a garage and another driver working for him when I left. That’s the thing he wanted to do, he just loved limousines. Me and the Limo weren’t a long time thing, it was probably about a ten year friendship.

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Gangster Apprentice

This is an excerpt from STAND-UP GUY, a true crime gangster memoir. 

Warning: contains adult content.

So after about a year, year and a half, I’m still working at the gas station, of course I was pumping the gas, and I was working the day shift on a weekend and this brand-new Cadillac pulls in. A white convertible with a black top. The gas receptacle was underneath the license plate so I went back there and I noticed that on his bumper was a sticker that said

Music Lounge – Entertainment Nightly – Seven Days A Week. Which I knew, because you know, I was eighteen and I was going to the Music Lounge, but I didn’t know this guy owned it.

I said, “Oh, the Music Lounge”.

This guy was well dressed, you know, and he walks over to me and goes, “How tall are you?”

And I said, “I’m six foot six”, you know, which I think I am now but I might have shrunk.

He said, “Well, did you ever think about being a bartender?”

So I said, “Well, I’ll tell you something, what’s your name?”

“Tommy. Tommy Escrole”. 

This Tommy was better known as Tommy Toupee. He wore a toupee that looked like a toupee. Tommy had owned a group of Shell stations in Pennsylvania, sold those, bought another Shell station on Long Island, got divorced from his first wife and started hanging out in nightclubs.  He was socializing and enjoying himself. He started liking the nightclub he was hanging out in and he had the money so he bought the club. The Music Lounge. He thought it would be a great business and it was. Tommy was not a connected guy but there were people coming into the place that were connected. That’s where I started to meet these people, at that club.

Anyway, he asked me whether or not I ever tended bar and I made a joke with him about if I was able to tend bar what would I be doing pumping gas? And he laughed and said, “I basically need a guy that’s willing to learn to tend bar in a top-shelf nightclub like I have. I have entertainment from all over the world coming here. I need a guy your size, not for a bouncer but a bartender because I have people three, four deep at that bar. When they raise their hand for a drink I want a drink in that hand because that’s how I make money. It’s hard to find a guy your size, your height that wants to be a bartender. That can see over three, four, five, six deep.” So I went to the Music Lounge. 

I went in for a period of two, three hours at first, working with the bartenders. I started out cleaning up the glasses but I was paying attention, analyzing how to make the drinks. The Brandy Alexanders, the Tom Collins, the Whiskey Sours, the Martinis, the Zombies and all the rest of the stuff that was popular in them days. I learned it all and I loved it. The place held lots of people and was full of single women. I was eighteen or nineteen at the time. It was in the sixties and it was wide open, I had women lined up. At first, when I wasn’t making much money, I hustled the women. They used to put their names and phone numbers on napkins and wrap it around the glass for me. Sometimes I would go home with two or three girls. We’d have orgies, switch women, yeah. Six, eight, ten sometimes we had twelve people. Depended on where we went, what we were doing. The less guys the better. Sometimes I’d have four, five women a day, gorgeous women and they had a lot of money. Rich women from the club. Suits, cars, they’d buy for me. All these women were older than me, in their mid to late twenties. I was strong, I was healthy and I was good at what I did, you know. So they came back for more. I got spoiled at an early age.

My thing was I loved Petrocelli Suits. They were expensive, at that time. I bought them in a store called Pasqual’s in Farmingdale, Long Island. Very expensive suit store that custom built them to your body. Everybody bought their suits at Pasqual’s. After awhile I was going suit crazy. I had suits for every occasion. Twenty or thirty suits. In those days a lot of places you went were Jackets Required. So I wore suits, I wore jewelry, diamond rings, cufflinks, you know, diamond stickpins. Silk ties. Every day. Every day. I was just a bartender but I made good money. This place was a top shelf club and I went from bar boy to assistant bartender to full-time bartender to head bartender in a very short period of time, maybe a year.

Anyway, Tommy had plenty of trouble in there because all the gangsters wanted a piece of that club. So he had to go to this trumpet player that was connected, Mike Mancini. He played the trumpet as a front. Mike Mancini and the Playboys. They were a show band that came in there and played a lot and Mike was connected. He kept the mob away from Tommy’s club. I analyzed all this. After awhile he did what he had to do. Mike was hooked up, not with the Long Island mob, he was hooked up with the mob in Manhattan, you know. Little Italy was where he was from. All his relatives were involved, you know, and he pulled some strings for Tommy.

Tommy was Italian, Tommy Escrole you know, but he was from Pennsylvania, from more or less a farm community. He grew up there and there was no gangsters or nothing and he didn’t know anybody. Then he got into the nightclub business in New York. Tommy was a smart businessman, he knew how to get the people in there. He gave away things and when you give you receive. I was glad I worked for him. More than once I quit and came back. Of course a successful nightclub, that’s what they want the connected guys. They could wash a lot of money in a place like that. Sure, play with the tapes, you know. Register tapes. Sure. It’s a great place to do that.

I started noticing all these people coming in and that Tommy was getting paranoid. I didn’t know there were bomb threats, you know, when I was working there. It was a very successful club. It was a big club and it held lots of people. They wanted that club and they wanted it bad. The gangsters that wanted that place were threatening to bomb it. Fire bomb it if he didn't give it up. They'd finish him off, him and the place. That’s when he had to go to Mike, when it got real rough. They were coming in there and they used to just stare at him. They used to sit at a table and just stare at him all the time and make him nervous. They thought they had themselves something but then he turned around and knew somebody. See? He knew somebody.

Mike was a good friend of mine. Mancini. He was an older guy. I was in my twenties and he must have been in his forties. He was about twenty years older than me. It was in the sixties and we had orgies. Different women and Mike was right there. He was cool. And he played a pretty good trumpet when he was sober. He had a great band. The band was good but Mike, Mike got a couple Jack Daniels in him and he’d hit some sour notes, man. But nobody would really give a shit, you know. The band was great. They wore tuxedos. Blue ones and different colored ones. In those days they used to dress. Then rock and roll started to come in, psychedelic rock and roll and the bands didn’t dress anymore. They’d come in, you know, in ripped jeans. You either had to accept them or you didn’t get them to play at your club. It was a different thing. But Mike was cool and he liked Tommy and he took care of the gangsters for him. Mike liked me too. He had a big mouth and he drank a lot and used to tell me all about what was going on and I analyzed all of it.

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Popped at White Castle

Chapter 17

Five Thousand Quaaludes

So I was going about my business, doing this, doing that, when I got busted on Long Island for possession and sales of five thousand Quaaludes. Nick wanted me to get something going in my old Long Island roots so I called a couple of friends of mine out on the Island. I hadn’t been in contact with them for a few years, two, three years, because I was in Florida and I was in Brooklyn and back and forth and so we connected and I started to do two, three pounds of pot a week, a little coke, a few Quaaludes. I’d take a train out there and I’d stay at this gal’s house I knew. I was a fugitive on the Island, I was a fugitive for about five years, but I took a chance. I did that awhile and then the gal that I was seeing had a friend that I knew too that hung out in this jazz club, this guy Gino. He was selling coke in this jazz club to musicians and stuff like that and he wanted a better connection so I went to see him. He would order a pound or two at a time and maybe fifty Quaaludes.

At this time Steve Bowman had this machine that would press out Quaaludes with the LEMONS lettering on them. They started out as Auroras, a very popular drug in the seventies. It was a muscle relaxer and it was used mostly by coke and amphetamine users because it would level you out.

So this guy Gino from the jazz club he knew me from years ago in the bar business and stuff and I knew his daughter and I knew his wife. So I go out to his house and he goes, well, I got this guy in the Hamptons that buys a lot so next week instead of two pounds bring five pounds and instead of a hundred Quaaludes bring five hundred Quaaludes. So I did and he paid me for them and everything was good. Nick was very happy, things are going along smooth, things are looking up, you’re doing it again, you’re building a nice thing here, continue it. See, with Steve pressing out these Quaaludes it wasn’t costing us much. We had the dope addicts rob the pharmaceutical place and get vats of this stuff that we needed. Steve was like a chemist too, a very educated guy but he was fucked up. Anyhow, he would process the Quaaludes and press them out on this machine in his living room when he was still with his wife. He’d do it during the day while she was working. He’d press out thousands of them.

After awhile Gino said the people in the Hamptons needed more, so bring me ten pounds and fifteen hundred Quaaludes. Then it got up to ten pounds and five thousand Quaaludes, and I said to Nick, “I don’t like the way this is going. I think I’m being set-up.” Nick at this point in his life is starting to get stupid on coke himself. Smoking a lot of base which is crack, making stupid fucking moves and shit like that, whatever. Going out with some despicable women besides the one he lives with. And he’s getting to be where he was having these coke hangovers and having these emotional swings. A coke hangover, you don’t even want to go through it, headache and feeling nauseous. It’s almost like a booze hangover but mostly it’s this strain in your head. That’s from doing the pills to come down, really. You know, your whole body’s racing and then you’re doing pills and lots of them to come off a two or three day jag, you know. That’s what I used to do. One time I stayed up a week. Didn’t eat, was only drinking orange juice until that turned my stomach then I stopped. I thought I was going to die.

Anyway, I said, “Nick, I really don’t think this is a good idea”.

Nick says, “You and Frances”, that was his girlfriend, “and the baby go out there with that order. I want you to do it tonight. Set it up with Gino”.

So I said okay and so we went out there in her car. Gino didn’t know what kind of car it was. We passed the house and I see two strange guys standing on his porch, his front steps, talking to each other, smoking a cigarette. I just didn’t like the situation. I said, “Frances make a u-turn and go back to Brooklyn”. We went back to Brooklyn and Nick is there snorting coke and doing this shit. He very rarely got loud and violent with me because he wasn’t really a strong-arm man, you know, he was more of a brain. He was the kind that didn’t work out, wasn’t a muscle-bound guy. He had other people to do his dirty work, you know. Anyhow, Nick says to me, “What do you want me to do with these fucking Quaaludes? Eat ‘em? You get out there and sell the motherfuckers. You call that Gino up and you tell him that the car broke down and you’re going to do this tomorrow. And Joey’s going out there with you. You don’t want to meet him at his house? Tell him you’ll meet him someplace. Do the deal!”

He was being paranoid that he couldn’t sell them because he was stoned. I figured that you could probably sell them maybe in a week. You could get rid of all of them combined. They were a great item. They were a sellable item, c’mon. But no, there was no talking to him at that time.

I told Nick, “I don’t like the situation”.

Nick goes, “And don’t let Gino know you’re thinking this way cause it’s just bullshit you’re thinking.”

So I said, “Alright Nick, you’re the boss”.

And he’s waving his fucking .38 and he goes, “And if you don’t do it I’m going to blow your fucking brains out! What do you think about that? You’re starting to aggravate me.” And I walked out.

I loved the guy, you know, and I see him going downhill now a little bit.

Joey picks me up the next afternoon and we make arrangements for Gino at four o’clock to meet us at the White Castle parking lot. A big White Castle out on Long Island, where these two guys would be in a red and white vehicle. I told them what kind of vehicle I had and we’d meet in the parking lot and they’d find us or we’d find them. When we get there I say to Joey roll around the parking lot once. We roll around it once, twice, and I see these people sitting around in cars with their newspapers up in their faces, like a lot of them. Cars parked way in the back of this White Castle parking lot. Everyone’s got newspapers? C’mon. And why is this helicopter flying around? I said to Joey, “I don’t like this. This is looking bad. I got a bad feeling the other night and I got a worse feeling today.” We didn’t have cell phones in them days so we had to go to a pay phone to call Nick.

“I don’t care what you do, you’re going to fucking do that! Do it!” And he hangs the phone up.

“Joey, he said do it”.

“Okay, Nick said to do it, well we’ll do it.”

So we see the red and white car come in. It looked like the Starsky and Hutch car, it really did. I said, “Joey, we’re gonna get popped. I got a feeling we’re going to get popped”.

“Are you such and such?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re such and such from the Hamptons. Gino sent us.”

All of a sudden helicopters are coming over, these people with the newspapers are all running out of their cars. Guns are drawn, sun-roof is opened and they’re standing on the roof with guns pointed at me. I mean I had all sorts of shit going on here. So I’m popped. They wanted to be real cool so they locked me up and they locked Joey up and they’re trying to find out who Nick was because Gino happened to talk to him on the phone a couple of times, on the pay phone in the dog grooming shop. They really couldn’t trace it, but they wanted to know who Nick was. When I was arrested they wanted to know names and people I knew.

The Organized Crime Squad, what they did was they started out with six phone books piled up on top of my head. Then they’d hit me as hard as they could with night-sticks on those books. They’d hit me with night-sticks on top of the phone books so there would be no marks. Then after I didn’t answer they’d take those books out one by one. They’d take a phone book out and make it five. Then it would get more intense because that one extra book was gone to absorb it. Finally they got down to one book and they beat me like ten times with that one book there. I couldn’t think straight but I still wouldn’t open my mouth. They want to know who Nick is. Nick told Gino he was in the hub of the Mafia and all this shit on the phone. Nick was losing it. But I told them nothing. Finally they stopped beating me and I went back into my cell. It was about a week until I felt better. I had terrible headaches.

The next day we had to go for arraignment. I was asked if I had a lawyer and I was just about to say no when this guy in a suit jumps up saying I’m his lawyer, I’m Joey’s lawyer. Nick sent this Mafia lawyer that represented a lot of big shots in Brooklyn. Blah, blah, blah, how much is bail, all of a sudden the bail is put up. It was like twenty thousand apiece, cash. Nick put up forty thousand dollars to get us out, plus he lost all that money for the drugs. Buy you know why? Because of him. Because of him being stupid. Joey and I were released on bail with my court date like two or three months later. We all got into the lawyer’s Cadillac and he drove us all back to Brooklyn and we partied. The lawyer didn’t party, he was strictly business. Nice guy, kind of a neighborhood guy that made it. A Brooklyn guy, office in Brooklyn. I heard he represented some big names. He was good at what he did.

Anyway, I took the blame. I said Joey was only a friend of mine driving me out there and he didn’t know what was in the attaché case. But they found .38 bullets in the back of his car and he lost his car, his Monte Carlo. It was a new one and he paid cash for it. He lost that. Drug deal? That’s gone. He loved that car too. Nick took my vehicle I was using and gave it to Joey but it wasn’t near as good. It was an Oldsmobile Cutlass and it was an older model. It was alright, I mean, better than nothing but Joey’s Monte Carlo was kind of new. I felt bad for Joey. I mean, Joey was forced into this, not by me, by Nick. He lost his Monte Carlo but they shifted the weight all on me which was what I wanted them to do because Joey really didn’t have nothing to do with this whole set-up. It was me and Nick really. Nick felt very, very bad about it and he even straightened out for about a month. He was talking about the stupid moves he’d been making and he should’ve listened to me and what do I want to do? I’ve got three months to do whatever I want to do before I’ve got to go to court. Nick had me working, you know, doing things still. I just went on with my life the way it was, you know. When the court date hit I got another I.D. and I never showed up.

They’d be looking for me on Long Island and they’d be looking for me in Brooklyn too. But you know how many people they’re looking for? And I didn’t murder anybody so it wasn’t really a priority with so much other shit going on. There was a recession going on at that time. Lots of crime going on, jails over-crowded. Police departments were over-budget and under-staffed and I was in an area where they would never look for me anyhow. I just went on with my life, man.

From Stand-Up Guy - A true crime gangster memoir.

Available here:

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337880070&sr=8-1

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337880189&sr=1-1

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Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/164427

Goodfellas

Goodfellas

I couldn’t stand Henry Hill from day one. Who’s this fucking prima donna I asked myself? Henry Hill.  

In 1970 I started a two-year sentence for that drug and firecrackers charge at the Nassau County Correctional Facility. Each floor had four dorms of twenty men each, eighty on a floor. I lived in the dorm next door to Henry Hill, Paul Vario and five or six other made guys. All those guys were in there for conspiracy. Paulie was doing a year. Out of Paulie’s twenty-person dorm about a half-dozen were with him. The rest of the guys he used to make leave when he didn’t want them around and they did it obediently. Fuck, yeah.  

The jail was between minimum and maximum security. You had a set of bars but the bars weren’t in the dorms they were on the entrances to the dorms. You shared a bathroom with twenty people, two or three or four urinals, some toilets, some sinks. Each one had a set of showers. I didn’t like it, I liked to be in a cell by myself. See, you’d get a lot of street thugs in there, they’d steal your candy, they’d steal your cigarettes. They were a lot of fights and stuff in there, more than in the separate cells. I only stayed in the dorms until Paulie and them started to disintegrate and leave, then it was no fun anymore.  

Anyway, when I get to prison those guys are already there. I started out in a regular cell and then they ask me if I would mind going into a dorm. At that time I didn’t know who was in the dorms. I had heard that all these gangsters were somewhere in there, but I didn’t know where. You hear everything in prison, the wire they call it. You know what’s coming down. You know what Joe Blow says he’s in there for but you know what he’s really in there for. We knew who the child molesters were, we knew who everybody was that were disguising themselves. They had a real rough time after they got discovered, I can tell you that. We knew exactly who was coming in and out. What we didn’t know Paulie and the boys would find out because they had all the guards paid off. There were no cell phones in them days but the guards used to let those guys out to use the pay phones. They’d give them change to call their people up every night.  There would be money sent to their houses in envelopes. The jail guards, they were all paid off, most of them. It wasn’t a very good job in them days, probably not to this day, so they made a little extra money for bullshit, you know?  

So anyway, I knew those guys were down there but all of a sudden I’m right next door to them. And I knew a couple of inmates that were friendly with them so they told the gangsters about me and who I worked for and stuff like that. They knew a couple people I worked for, you know, or been involved with, that I was a stand-up guy, a good guy. So, it was all good.  

If you lived in the dorms you were supposed to work. Maybe in the kitchen or in the officer’s mess as a waiter. I worked in the kitchen, so you would steal tea bags or something for Paulie. He would tell you what he wanted. I need this, I need that, I need a couple loaves of bread to make stuffing or something like that. They’d bring in chests of food and they worked on occasion in the kitchen too. They were all cooks and stuff and we ate good. The whole prison ate good when they cooked. The way they use to make dishes and stuff, real good. The food was excellent. I can’t say nothing about the food. It was good. I ate real good. I gained a little weight in there.  

I remember Paulie used to dye his hair. When he first came in there his hair was black. A couple months later it started to turn gray. He said to me, “I can’t wait to get out to paint my hair.” I mean he had kids and everything but he was a player. He wasn’t living with his wife I don’t think and he had young girlfriends and stuff like that.  

After awhile they separated those guys and they made Henry move out of Paulie’s dorm and into my dorm so we were living in the same dorm. I said to Paulie, “Who is this fucking jerk?” meaning Henry. He just looked like a fucking jerk. My friend told me he was a bitch. He’d bitch about everything. Complain. A whiner. Henry Hill was a fucking whiner. So, I said to the guy, right in front of Paulie, I said, “Man, I hate this motherfucker, keep him away from me.”  

Paulie goes, “Oh, he’s a good guy. He’s like a son to me” and all this other stuff.  

I says, “Paulie, I…I…I don’t know, man. I don’t like him. I really don’t. In fact, I kinda hate him. I want to beat the shit out of him or something.”  

“Oh, no, oh, no, please don’t do that”, Paulie says.  I couldn’t stand Henry. I couldn’t stand him. He used to sit there in swag white uniforms from the kitchen, he didn’t want to wear the blue uniforms like everybody else, and then he never even worked in the kitchen. Maybe he worked in the kitchen once or twice. I very rarely saw him work. Work? Fuck work. He was selling drugs in there. Anyway, he used to go and get shoe polish and polish his little shoes, and brush his little teeth. I thought that the guy didn’t have the balls to be in the position that he was in. I had a feeling he wasn’t strong enough to hold up. He was a bitch and that’s what I wanted to do, bitch-smack him, I dreamed of it.

US: http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335805806&sr=1-1

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336138607&sr=1-1

Please Send Postcards

Please Send Postcards

I love postcards and am saddened that people no longer send them while on vacation. I was at Disneyland last week and was unpleasantly surprised when it became near impossible to find postcards for sale. Eventually I found a couple of booklets of ten cards but these seemed more meant for at-home viewing rather than sending to friends and family.

When I bring up the lack of postcard sending people always say something along the lines of well these days you can just send a pic so easily who needs postcards? I love pics too but a postcard is a small gift. You get the picture, a message, a post-mark and a stamp. A person has taken a moment out of their day to remember you and share a little token of their vacation. In an old episode of The Andy Griffith Show the Taylors are in Hollywood, California on vacation and Aunt Bee runs out of postcards and asks Andy to pick up some more while he's out.

I buy old postcards sometimes and I'll buy one with a message over a blank card. These messages are strikingly similar. They usually mention how hot/cold it is, oftentimes noting the exact temperature, whether they went swimming or not and what Aunt/Uncle was visited. It's always Aunts and Uncles for some reason. It's also surprising to me how many people had their mail forwarded to them during their two weeks in Florida or what not and many times the cards will note a departure date and ask the recipient to please stop forwarding their mail.

Fortunately I have a couple of sweet girlfriends that will indulge my desire to rejuvenate the sending of postcards and I am grateful to them for that. In the middle of a handful of catalogs, bills, ads and flyers it's uplifting to find a pretty card with a short message and know your friend is having a good time on vacation and wants to share a moment of that with you.

Monday blues? How about a little crime spree?

STAND-UP GUY

Stories of sex, drugs and violence are told by a guy who did it all – except rat on his friends. Nostalgic, blunt, touching and brutal, it’s a fast-paced journey into and out of the days and nights of a street level gangster. From jacking the pumps at the local Texaco to disappearing owing the mob money, this is a true story of twenty years on the streets of Brooklyn and Long Island selling drinks, women and drugs along the way.

The story is a fast drive that starts with recruitment by Tommy Toupee and speeds straight into the dark nights and early morning hours of hardcore gangster life. Experience what it was like to break a knee-cap, hustle a chick, hide out in Florida and wash prison laundry while trippin’ on acid. Twenty years on the streets with a guy who could never be made but dedicated himself nonetheless to being the best there was to be whether it was tending bar, selling women or dealing cocaine. Never giving up anybody, taking the heat and doing the time until a taste for coke and the need for money drove him to the edge and he had to disappear. Now all this former tough-guy gangster wants is to be make things right back home. It’s Long Island and Brooklyn at their seediest best compelling you into the alleys and apartments where it all went down. Grab yourself a Petrocelli suit, bolt down a ham steak at the Cadillac Diner and hang on for a quick hit of adventure New York City gangster style.

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335805754&sr=1-1

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335805806&sr=1-1

The Best Names in the NFL

The Best Names in the NFL

I like to collect names and store them away for future characters in books I will never write. The National Football League is a veritable gold mine of great names. I can easily get distracted during a game by an amazing name like Oshiomogho Atogwe and wonder about the origins, the correct pronunciation and what their childhood friends called them. Cam Newton is a soap opera name if I've ever heard one. Of course, like the rest of the world, the NFL is swamped with Jasons, Justins, Joshs and James. I'm a devoted Rams fan but I have trouble keeping some of the players straight because their names are so similar. I have my favorites though. Names so evocative that sometimes it's hard to remember they're football players. Here are my favorites:

5. Jermichael Finley - Green Bay

This name is melodic and is a refreshing change from the ordinary Michael. Not that there's anything wrong with Michael. It's solid and strong. My own husband is named Michael so it's a name I love but sometimes I do like to mix it up and will say, "Hamburgers or hotdogs, Jermichael?" or "Hey Jermichael, have you seen the cat?".

4. Julius Peppers - Chicago

Omg...who wouldn't want to hang with Julius Peppers? It has to be the happiest name in the NFL. Julius Peppers tells the best jokes, has the best dance moves and in general is a spot of sunshine on a cloudy day. Of course I don't know if the real Julius Peppers is any of that but I do know that he has a career as a Vegas magician just waiting for him post-football.

3. Bob Sanders - San Diego

Bob Sanders is simply the coolest, hippest insurance agent in the Midwest. He'll make you a great deal on home, health, life or auto.

2. Jason Pierre-Paul - New York Giants

C'mon, dude's got himself three first names! And one of them is French! He's a folk trio all by himself! I can just hear his mom now - "Jason Pierre-Paul get in this house this minute!". And any player whose name stretches from shoulder to shoulder across his jersey gets a big thumbs up from me.

1. Pierre Garçon - Indianapolis 

Pierre Garçon designs beautiful haute couture when he's not catching passes for the Colts. He also knows every masterpiece in the Louve and makes a mean Croque Monsieur. He off-seasons in Paris.

Honorable Mention: London Fletcher - Washington

His name is London. Nuff said.

It's glorious these exciting, unusual or sometimes surprisingly unadorned names you find in football. The plain one, the one with all the apostrophes, the one impossible to pronounce. And I admire the on-air talent who mostly seem to get it right. I know I might be reduced to something like "I'm so sorry to hear about the tragic death of your beloved grandmother who raised you from birth, #83."

A Gangster Gets His Start

This is an excerpt from STAND-UP GUY, a true crime gangster memoir.

The Music Lounge. I went in for a period of two, three hours at first, working with the bartenders. I started out cleaning up the glasses but I was paying attention, analyzing how to make the drinks. The Brandy Alexanders, the Tom Collins, the Whiskey Sours, the Martinis, the Zombies and all the rest of the stuff that was popular in them days. I learned it all and I loved it. The place held lots of people and was full of single women. I was eighteen or nineteen at the time. It was in the sixties and it was wide open, I had women lined up. At first, when I wasn’t making much money, I hustled the women. They used to put their names and phone numbers on napkins and wrap it around the glass for me. Sometimes I would go home with two or three girls. We’d have orgies, switch women, yeah. Six, eight, ten sometimes we had twelve people. Depended on where we went, what we were doing. The less guys the better. Sometimes I’d have four, five women a day, gorgeous women and they had a lot of money. Rich women from the club. Suits, cars, they’d buy for me. All these women were older than me, in their mid to late twenties. I was strong, I was healthy and I was good at what I did, you know. So they came back for more. I got spoiled at an early age. 

My thing was I loved Petrocelli Suits. They were expensive, at that time. I bought them in a store called Pasqual’s in Farmingdale, Long Island. Very expensive suit store that custom built them to your body. Everybody bought their suits at Pasqual’s. After awhile I was going suit crazy. I had suits for every occasion. Twenty or thirty suits. In those days a lot of places you went were Jackets Required. So I wore suits, I wore jewelry, diamond rings, cufflinks, you know, diamond stickpins. Silk ties. Every day. Every day. I was just a bartender but I made good money. This place was a top shelf club and I went from bar boy to assistant bartender to full-time bartender to head bartender in a very short period of time, maybe a year.

Anyway, Tommy had plenty of trouble in there because all the gangsters wanted a piece of that club. So he had to go to this trumpet player that was connected, Mike Mancini. He played the trumpet as a front. Mike Mancini and the Playboys. They were a show band that came in there and played a lot and Mike was connected. He kept the mob away from Tommy’s club. I analyzed all this. After awhile he did what he had to do. Mike was hooked up, not with the Long Island mob, he was hooked up with the mob in Manhattan, you know. Little Italy was where he was from. All his relatives were involved, you know, and he pulled some strings for Tommy.

Tommy was Italian, Tommy Escrole you know, but he was from Pennsylvania, from more or less a farm community. He grew up there and there was no gangsters or nothing and he didn’t know anybody. Then he got into the nightclub business in New York. Tommy was a smart businessman, he knew how to get the people in there. He gave away things and when you give you receive. I was glad I worked for him. More than once I quit and came back. Of course a successful nightclub, that’s what they want the connected guys. They could wash a lot of money in a place like that. Sure, play with the tapes, you know. Register tapes. Sure. It’s a great place to do that.

I started noticing all these people coming in and that Tommy was getting paranoid. I didn’t know there were bomb threats, you know, when I was working there. It was a very successful club. It was a big club and it held lots of people. They wanted that club and they wanted it bad. The gangsters that wanted that place were threatening to bomb it. Fire bomb it if he didn't give it up. They'd finish him off, him and the place. That’s when he had to go to Mike, when it got real rough. They were coming in there and they used to just stare at him. They used to sit at a table and just stare at him all the time and make him nervous. They thought they had themselves something but then he turned around and knew somebody. See? He knew somebody.

Buy it here:

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Fog-Soaked Easter Eggs and the Dogs Who Loved Them

(I wrote this for Yahoo Voices' "Easter Memories" section.)

Fog-Soaked Easter Eggs and the Dogs Who Loved Them

Laurie Brown, Yahoo! Contributor Network

Easter morning started early at my house growing up. My dad (aka The Easter Bunny) always played golf at 6am on Sunday mornings and Easter was no exception. We had a decent-sized backyard with lots of good hiding spots so although I was never a witness to it, I think the hiding went quick and easy. These eggs were always ones we dyed ourselves. If it was older kids doing the job the eggs would be the vibrant pink, purple, green and blue depicted on the Paas Coloring Kit. If younger kids had a hand in it the eggs had a tendency to come out a weird grayish-purple from mixing colors and grubby hands. It wouldn't matter though because when all was said and done all the eggs, no matter who the creator, would come out sort of spotted and odd-colored and not really looking like something anyone would want to eat. This was thanks to fog.

It was almost always foggy in the morning in Monterey, California where I grew up and especially at 6am. Set an egg on the grass or behind a bush in the fog, wait two or three hours until the kids got up, and you would find eggs that looked significantly different than the night before. I can still see them clearly...mottled would probably be the best word to describe them. If it was a really wet, drpping fog, much of the dye would wash off and then you'd have a pale egg, maybe slightly sickly looking but still worth money if it was the coveted twenty-five cent egg. Slugs loved these wet, slick eggs and you'd want to pick them off before you put the egg in your basket near your candy.

Of course following their usual morning routine the dogs would go out before the kids and they did some unauthorized egg hunting on their own. Sometimes they liked to boast of their find by carrying into the house a pinkish egg in their drooling mouth. Others preferred to sneak their find off to a corner of the yard and eat it leaving only the bits of colored shell behind as evidence. Once, a black lab belonging to my brother unearthed a long missing egg at a Fourth of July barbecue that both looked horrendous and smelled terrible.

I'm all grown-up now and living in the Midwest. I still dye eggs but they remain the color intended. I have dogs but since I don't hide eggs they have nothing to unintentionally hunt for. It always a very nice day but I do miss those damp Easter mornings with the crazy looking eggs and the happy, smelly dogs.

Sample Sunday - Collecting for the Mob.

From STAND-UP GUY :

So Robert and I started out as collectors. After a while we were called the collectors of the last resort because they would call us when it was the last resort, when they tried everything else. So, we would – now this is violent – knock on their door, bust open their door, come into their house. If the guy was in there we would get him together in front of his whole family and beat the living shit out of him. Cripple them if need be. Beat ‘em with a baseball bat. I only used Louisville Sluggers, they’re the best bats. Don’t kill ‘em. Leave them breathing. That’s what we would do.

I kind of like got invigorated with all this, you know. I couldn’t wait for the next time to go. It was the power, all that power. I was never scared, not even the first time and it was just a job after awhile. We knew they might have weapons but they weren’t going to use them against us because most of these people were fucking idiots. They were pathetic gamblers, people that didn’t have the respect for the money they borrowed. They borrowed money and they gotta pay it back. And they were asked to pay it back many, many, many times. We were the last resort, Robert and I. We beat ‘em up in front of their families. We beat ‘em up in their businesses. No matter where they were we were there. We never left without putting a hand on somebody because that’s what we did. There were other people who went before us who were very negotiable, but not us. We were the last resort like I said, that’s it.

Robert took me on a couple of light cases first to, you know, get me involved, warmed-up. Just maybe a bitch smacking or something, you know. Or push a guy up against a wall type thing. Then it got worse and I got into it and then we started getting all the contracts for that kind of thing. We were fed them. It wasn’t very busy, maybe one or two or three a week. I wanted to do it every day of the week. I wanted to be a gangster, right there and then, I was invigorated. I loved it.

I would have to come back and pick up the money after I gave them the beating. They would get it some way, I never had a problem. A couple of people wanted to turn me in, but you do that then, you know, I’ll be in jail but Joe Blow my friend won’t. He’ll be on the outside and he’ll get you.  We only did this for a couple of years though. Robert was married and his wife was giving him pressure about getting a real job so he left. He was a union painter and had two kids. Finally he said I got to give this up my wife’s on my back. Needless to say he came back to it after about a year, after him and his wife split up.

I loved beating people up. In nightclubs, when they fucked-up in my club, I loved beating the shit out of them. At this one place I’d throw them over a fence into a stream behind the club. I loved that, throwing them into a stream half-conscious, after I beat them up. Then they’d know not to fuck-up where I worked. My clubs were clean. No one fucked-up. My clubs were run with an iron fist. You fuck up in my club and the word got out you’d be hospitalized.

AmazonUS: http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332083670&sr=1-1

AmazonUK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332083745&sr=8-1

Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stand-up-guy-laurie-brown/1109393156?ean=2940013925977&itm=1&usri=stand-up+guy

Moonshiners v. Toddlers & Tiaras: Smackdown

I love reality TV and anyone who says they don't has never seen Bret Michaels in his flame pajamas, WITHOUT his bandana, attempting to have vh-1 approved phone sex with a complete stranger on Rock of Love.

I was hooked on Toddlers and Tiaras from the *ads* for the show. Sparkly dresses, nut-job moms, pixie stix? Please. It took me a little longer to warm up to Moonshiners because it's about, you know, Moonshiners. But since my husband likes it and since he watches T&T with me the least I could do was watch Moonshiners with him.

So, drawing my inspiration from the Midwest's own Li'l Miss and Li'l Mister Horseradish Pageant, here are my categories and likely outcomes should Toddlers & Tiaras and Moonshiners ever go head to head:

1. Best Costume: It's hard to beat pink cupcake dresses with Anita Bryant hair and fake horse teeth but the winner has got to be Tim from Moonshiners and his denim overalls. In the summer worn without a shirt, or come fall when a tee becomes necessary, it's the consistency that wins out here. Every episode. Just like Gilligan. Winner: Moonshiners.

2. Best Talent: Those little girls can bust some moves. They can also stand there awkwardly working the hem of their skirt while their mom has a conniption fit out in the audience. The Moonshiners dudes can build/fix anything and manage to hide an entire still operation out in the woods camouflaging it against spies both from the air and on the ground. Still, it's hard to beat a tiny muffin in full on luau wear including a coconut bra and cardboard ukelele hula-ing herself dangerously close to the edge of the stage. Winner: Toddlers & Tiaras.

3. Best Personality: This depends on if you mean personality as in sweet and charming and someone you'd like to hang around with, or personality as in you can't tear your eyeballs away from them. T&T has plenty of both, moms and daughters, with a definite lean towards the crazy-personality. However, I'm going to give this award to Tickle from Moonshiners because he is such an agreeable guy, willing to do whatever is asked of him and totally supports the cause if you know what I mean. Tickle loves him some 'shine. Winner: Moonshiners.

4. Best "Beauty": This is sort of unfair because there are some very pretty little girls on T&T. I mean it's sort of hard to tell sometimes under all that fake hair and grandma-style make-up but I think it's basically true. (An aside - in my own attempt to go "glitz" as as a kid I tried to put on some fake eyelashes and ended up in the ER because I glued my eyes shut.) Tim from Moonshiners looks like he might be a handsome man but his "total package", cowboy hat, shirtless overalls, etc. really isn't working for me. Winner: Toddlers & Tiaras.

5. Best Platform/Where do you see yourself in five years?: Well, Tim wants to go legit and get a license and stuff so he can pass the heritage of moonshining down to his son without the whole it being against the law thing. Tres noble. On the other hand the goal of most of the T&T contestants is to live in a pink castle with a purple unicorn. Hmmmm. Winner: Moonshiners.

6. Most resourceful: I have seen moms on T&T who when confronted with a uncooperative curling iron go into the kind of state that would allow them to lift a car off their little beauty queen. And never, ever get near a pageant mom whose room key card doesn't work fifteen minutes before beauty. Again Tim and Tickle can build anything, bend and fold metal to their will, chainsaw down trees to build a shelter, hide propane in the woods. Whatever it takes. Not that the moms on Toddlers & Tiaras don't believe in whatever it takes, they do. Including giving their 4 year old energy drinks so she'll be "on" for talent. Winner: Both.

7. Best Use of a Mason Jar: This one seems like a no brainer given the very nature of Moonshiners, but some of those moms and daughters drive a looooooooong way to get to those pageants. Just saying. Winner: Moonshiners.

Ultimate Grand Supreme: Well, Moonshiners won the most categories, but it's not really ever hard to watch like good reality TV should be. You don't really hate yourself afterwards. It's interesting, has some historical value and raises some ethical questions along the way. No one gets drunk (except Tickle), no one gets slapped and no one bursts into tears. The same cannot be said for Toddlers & Tiaras. Although to be fair, I've never seen anyone drunk on that show. But they don't need to be, they are plenty wacked-out as is. And I do feel bad about myself afterwards. For about five minutes. Winner: Toddlers & Tiaras!!!!!

Teaching Myself Speed Reading

When I was a kid I was fascinated by the commercials for speed reading. This was probably in the late 1960's, early 1970's. I loved to read and was somewhat hyper-competitive in terms of any sort of academic achievement. If there were people out there who could speed read...child or adult, man or woman...then I wanted to speed read too.

In the commercials the readers shown ran their hand over each page in a vaguely waving motion, kinda fast because this was, you know, speed reading, and then quickly turned the page. They could finish a whole book in record time. Why they wanted to read so fast was never discussed and it didn't occur to me to wonder about their motivation. I also don't know if it was ever explained what the swishing of the hand had to do with reading fast or if I just didn't listen to the particulars, but I did believe the magic waveswish had something to do with it. You could not speed read if you didn't use your hand.

So I started to train. I would get a book and buzz through it as fast as my eight year-old mind could go. Fast was the method. Read fast. I'd skim over small words. Who needed "the" anyway? "A", "an", "and" were for slow-poke readers. Words I didn't know? I'd think about those later. Not really knowing why I'd waveswish my hand over the pages absorbing maybe 60-70% of what I read. That was enough as far as I was concerned. It was an exhausting way to read but after a few months I felt gratified because I felt I had accomplished my goal of becoming a speed reader. I gave myself an imaginary certificate with a large fake gold seal.

It wasn't until years later that I learned there was a real method to speed reading. It was not just reading as fast as you could and their method was not dissimilar to my own. Skip the small words and concentrate on the bigger issues. And my unapproved method of speed reading definitely helped me in law school where we would have to consume massive amounts of written words although I had long ago abandoned the waveswish part. I find that even now, firmly in middle age, I still employ my technique even though I'm not in a hurry and have nothing to prove.

Next time: How the "bee" verbs ruined my life.

A Gangster Goes To Prison

From Stand-Up Guy - A True Crime Gangster Memoir.

When I finally got sentenced the prisons were so over-crowded they were moving people around, shuffling them around the different prisons. The first place I spent time in was in Suffolk County, New York because that’s where it all happened, on Long Island. Then I did the tour. I had O.C. next to my name because I was associated with organized crime and they didn’t keep us in one spot too long because you were apt to meet people in the same boat. They didn’t want us to be together so they kept on shuffling us around. I went to three or four different prisons in two years, which wasn’t bad.

Actually Sing-Sing was first but it was just processing, it wasn’t a full-blown prison, it was a reception center. Before you went to do your time you would be processed at Sing-Sing. Nobody was really staying there. All your paperwork, your medical exams, everything would be done there and then you’d go to a certain place, a prison, wherever they wanted to send you in the state of New York. I was at Sing-Sing maybe about four, six weeks, something like that. They had reconditioned a lot of stuff there, electric gates and stuff. They weren’t electric years ago, they were all powered by levers. It was amazing how they did it. It was noisy but you got used to it. But then these hacks, some of them were assholes, and at night they’d come down and take that big key and they’d run it across the bars and they’d wake you up. You never had a good night’s sleep in those damn places, between that and the fucking rats eating my commissary if I left it in a bag on the floor. You’d hear them in there scratching around, the mice and the rats and the roaches. I’d wake up and peel the roaches out of my hair. The Long Island institutions were filthy, the New York institutions in general were filthy. Sing-Sing was okay because they just rehabbed that. 

They tried to segregate the psychos from the normal people, they put them on a certain tier they call it but it didn’t always work out. You always got somebody in there that’s going to aggravate you. Everybody’s on edge, I mean it’s not a very happy place to be. You make the best of it. That’s what I used to tell guys that were all nervous and stuff, afraid they might get killed. “Well, it’s easy for you to talk, you’re six foot six”. I’d say, “Yeah, it’s not very easy for me to talk because if a big chunk of metal hits me in the head it could knock my six foot six body down and kill me.” Or a shank. There were plenty of shanks in there but I never had one. Never wanted one. They could search my cell ‘til the cows come home and they wouldn’t find shit. I used these, my fists, you know, that was it. I had shanks pulled on me and I pulled them out of people’s hands believe it or not. My reflexes were good, take it right out of their hand like nothin’. You know, I got stabbed a couple of times in my life, in the hands, but whatever.

I went to one prison in upstate New York I really liked. Erie County Penitentiary. It was supposedly a Civil War prison. Architecture-wise it looked like a castle, a fortress and it was absolutely spotless. They were very clean up there, you could eat off the floors. And the food was great because they had all this property. They were in upstate New York and they had their own cows, their own chickens, their own pigs and they had their own slaughterhouse and they had their own butchery so you ate really fresh food. And they had farms with vegetables fresh right out of the ground. And there were decent guards up there. They were really cool, different than the ones in Long Island where they treated you like a piece of shit. These people treated you like human beings up there. It was very good. It might have been an old prison but they had new ideas.

It was very close to the Canada border and in the winter all you would see was white. Look out the bars, the window and you see the yard was about six feet high in snow. They had an indoor yard where you could get your exercise. They called it the indoor yard, the indoor facility because in the winter you couldn’t go outside because of the snow. The yard was filled with snow so they had an indoor thing to get your recreation. They had pool tables up there, it was really neat. Church services and AA meetings with cake. They loved me there because I was so neat with my cell. Oh, you’re so neat. We like people that are neat.

I did have one incident up there. You were allowed one phone call a month. I went up to the phone and this
guy wouldn’t get off and I was supposed to call my girlfriend at the time at a certain time and he said, “Fuck
you, I’m not getting off this phone.” So I grabbed the receiver out of his hand and I broke his nose with it
and split his lip. I made my call, you know and they were pretty cool about it. They just said this was a
skirmish and this was a warning and one more time there would be trouble but I didn’t cause much trouble
up there.

Available here:

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