The maddening part for the feds is that they’re convinced Patty is right under their noses. Somewhere right there in the old neighborhood. “He’s close, I know it, right there in Sunnyside,” said Agent Joe Martinolish, a polite FBI agent who’s been in charge of the Patty Huston case for two years. “This is one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever done. We’ve talked to literally dozens of people who know Patty or have known Patty. We’ve been over to those bars in Queens. But we just can’t get anyone to say anything about him. They’re completely uncooperative. I tell them about the ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to Patty’s capture. Nothing doing. I think the lack of informants is the most significant thing about this case. I just can’t understand it.”
A couple of days later, I stopped by the 108th Precinct on Fiftieth Avenue in Long Island City to ask about Patty. “Sure, Patty Huston. I arrested his son the other day,” said a young detective. “Jumped a turnstile. He had a warrant out for him.” I said I wasn’t aware Patty had a son. The FBI said he had never been married. The cop shook his head. What are the feds supposed to know about Sunnyside? He’s got a wife too, here’s the address. It was about six blocks from where we were, off Queens Boulevard.
A half hour later, I rang the bell. A thin woman about forty came to the door in a pink bathrobe. She had a green towel around her head, like she just got out of the shower. She was smoking a cigarette.
“Mrs. Huston?” I asked.
“Yeah?” Her voice was sweeter than you’d figure. She wasn’t very tall and over her shoulder you could look into the living room. There was an exercise bicycle and a La-Z-Boy recliner.
“I’d like to ask you about your husband, Patty.”
“Who are you?” She was waiting to see a badge of some sort, as if my visit was part of a ritual, a weekly event. Hearing I wasn’t a cop but rather a reporter from the Village Voice, she let out a laugh.
“The Village what? … Look, my husband Patrick is dead to me. There’s nothing between us. I wouldn’t tell you anything anyhow.” Then she closed the door in my face.
There was nothing else left to do but go back to the bar, where they said if Patty gets caught it’ll be because of the Puerto Ricans. Apparently, after all that jail time, Patty buddied up with a lot of PRs. He even learned to speak Spanish. People even spoke of him taking a car service over to Corona to eat “that Puerto Rican food.”
“He likes that big-ass PR tail,” said one of the local drinkers. This, everyone said, would be Patty’s real downfall, because Puerto Ricans, they’re not stand-up. If you ain’t one of them, they’ll rat you out in a second. It wasn’t anything anyone would have expected from Patty Huston, trusting people from outside the neighborhood. Inevitably the cops would catch Patty again, everyone said. But until then, no one wanted to say nothing else. When it came to Patty Huston, the last Irish Cowboy from Sunnyside, they were dummies.
14
The Ear of Sheepshead Bay
I am an easy laugh. But the jokes have to be funny. If they are not funny, I get depressed because there is nothing more depressing than someone trying to be funny and not being funny. George Schultz, of the Sheepshead Schultzs, knew this better than most. Arbiter of the funny, he retained sympathy for the unfunny. Up to a point. As they say, comedy is a very, very serious business. A story of high stakes in a small venue. From the Village Voice, 1978.
Half my family (my mother’s side) is from Sheepshead Bay. They lived on Avenue Z until Robert Moses routed the Belt Parkway through their kitchen. Then they moved to East Nineteenth Street and Avenue X. My mother never could figure if living on Avenue X or Avenue Z carried a bigger psychological stigma.
For years we used to come the Bay, to visit the remaining family members. It was always fun, walking by the mucky water, hearing captains of the fishing boats like The Brooklyn Five bark like carnies, “Bluefish! The big boat for the blues!” Sometimes we’d eat dinner at Lundy’s, “the world’s largest restaurant” (it said so in the Guinness Book of World Records), which was big enough to have seventy-four illegal aliens picked up by the Immigration Department on a single shift. Now most of the relatives, including my beloved uncle Jack who always got plastered at the bar mitzvahs, have either died or moved to New Jersey.
But I still come to the Bay, to see my old friend George Schultz, who runs a little comedy club on Emmons Avenue called Pip’s. George lives above the club in a two-bedroom apartment he shares with his two sons, Marty and Seth. The boys, both in their late teens, are a fine-looking pair, George doesn’t mind telling you.
“They’re my two Jewish Warren Beattys, yiddisha hunks.” In deference to Seth and Marty’s Hebrew handsomeness, George never lets his sons see him nude. “It’s the old ass,” says George, in the midst of complaining about his various ailments, real and imagined, which include insomnia, diabetes, emphysema, imminent heart attack, collapsed lungs, and the terrible desire to throw himself into the bay that overcomes him at any time of the day or night.
“I can’t let them see the old ass,” George says. “They’re young, they’re beautiful, let them live a little, the inevitable will come soon enough.”
There was a time George did not have an old ass. He had a pompadour instead. That was back in the early 1950s when he called himself Georgie Starr, master of mimicry and dean of satire. Around East Fifth Street and Avenue N, where George grew up, masters of mimicry and deans of satire were a dime a dozen. Georgie Starr knew them all. His best friend was Jack Roy, the once Jacob Cohen and future Rodney Dangerfield. They hung out all the time, mostly trying, and failing, to pick up girls at Brighton Beach.
It was on one all-to-typical night on the Brighton boardwalk that George went off on one of his gangster spritzes. “I was inspired because we had gone over to Coney Island and walked by the Half Moon Hotel where they threw Abe “Kid Twist” Reles out the window. The guy is guarded by six detectives and somehow he falls four stories. He tripped, they said…. Anyway, I’m doing my bit, in between eating a Nathan’s hot dog, in my gangster voice, saying ‘There’s no respect for a guy like me…. I kill seventeen guys and still there’s no respect.’
“Now Rodney, he’s barely paying attention, maybe hoping some asshole is gonna fall off the Parachute Jump, and all of a sudden he says, ‘No respect’ … ‘I like that no respect.’ Now when a comic—and we weren’t really even comics then—says he likes something that usually means, ‘Can I have that?’ I’m thinking, sure, what do I care, it’s yours. That’s how Rodney got the ‘I don’t get no respect’ thing, which made him, and I’ve always thought that was swell because he kind of developed the concept, if you know what I mean. Plus, he used to take me to Vegas with him, all expenses paid, back when I still could get a hard-on.”
George had other friends in the Avenue N days. There was Buddy Hackett, whom George calls “a top prick, even then.” There was Joe Ancis, the funniest of them all, too anxiety-ridden to ever tell a joke for money but famous for his phobias, like always carrying his own roll of paper so his bare tukhis never touched a public toilet seat. There was Lenny Schneider, who changed his last name to Bruce.
George has plenty of Lenny stories. He remembers the first time they met at the Bali Club, a little dive off Ocean Avenue. “Lenny came in with his mother. He was wearing a navy uniform. He was young. Nice. Funny. We became friends and he moved into the apartment I shared with Rodney on Avenue N. Just the three of us. There wasn’t a stove. But didn’t matter. We weren’t the cooking types. Lenny’s mother used to bring by food, stand there while we ate it. A lot of pot roast, it was, with those little overcooked Jewish peas.”
Nearly twenty years later George would see Lenny one last time, shortly before Bruce overdosed. Bruce was staying in a West Eighth Street hotel room, with bloody towels in the bathroom.
Those days all the Brooklyn neighborhoods had comic clubs. Besides the Bali, there was the Pink Elephant in Brighton and Jinks in Coney. Even Bay Ridge, full of Italians, had joints. Th
e patter was thick, a real Jewish cutting contest, like the ones black piano players used to wage up in Harlem. Remembering the old act, George starts twitching, his rheumy eyes blinking like hazard lights.
“Forget about it,” he says. “I did stupid stuff. Bad. Shithouse song parodies, facockta impressions of John Garfield dying at Guadalcanal. Everyone wanted to get on The Ed Sullivan Show. I never even watched The Ed Sullivan Show. For me it was beautiful shiksas. Kissing them. Screwing them. Marrying them. Divorcing them. I guess I never had the lunatic ego it took to make it.”
So Georgie Starr gave up stand-up. He got married and moved to Little Neck, in Queens, where he sold storm windows and cemetery plots (“You’ll plotz for our plots!!”). A decade it was, schlepping in the middle class. The only good thing was the new Chevy the electrical appliance company gave him. But he never could get away from the jokes.
“It’s inside,” George says, grabbing at his ample chest. “Jews tell jokes.”
So in 1962 George came back to Brooklyn. The Bali and the rest of the decent clubs were long gone. Sheepshead Bay was one the few neighborhoods where the survival rate for a ten-minute walk after dark was over 50 percent. He and his then-wife, Rita, rented a long-vacant Emmons Avenue storefront beside the calamari stands and called it Pip’s, referencing Dickens’s Great Expectations, “like it was going to be something.” Opened before Manhattan clubs like the Improv and Catch a Rising Star, and set up like a beatnik coffee shop where dewy-eyed romantics from Brooklyn College could strum songs about John Henry and pretend to be Parisian expatriates, George envisioned Pip’s as “a university of comedy, a place to come learn how to be funny.”
This was prescient since over the next decade or so almost every working comic in the New York area—Joan Rivers, Andy Kaufman, George Carlin, Robert Klein, David Brenner, Woody Allen, Billy Crystal, Jay Leno, Gabe Kaplan, Ed Bluestone, David Steinberg, Elaine Boosler, and Rodney among them—have played Pip’s, pocketing the fabulous $6.90 Schultz pays for a half-hour set.
In the beginning George would introduce the acts, do a little patter. But this was a waste of his true talent. They call George “the ear,” that is, it takes George about thirty seconds to tell whether someone’s funny or not. Give him another ten seconds and he’ll tell you if the comic will ever be funny. In this, George is never, ever, wrong.
Like the other night this little sawed-off guy came in off Emmons Avenue wearing a caftan. Calling himself Kid Brooklyn, he claimed to be the funniest fucker this side of Kings Highway.
“If you’re so funny, how come I haven’t seen you,” George asked Kid Brooklyn. That’s because he’d been in Cleveland, The Kid said, going to Case Reserve University. That so, George reposited, adding that he’d gone to college in Cleveland, too. “Cleveland Rabbinical.” Really, Kid Brooklyn said, with clueless lack of uptake. “Haven’t heard of it. Is it a good school?”
“Need I say more?” George asked, rolling his eyes as he related the incident. “Listen, if someone is nice-looking, well-adjusted, swell parents, good teeth—the kid is not goint to be funny.” Maybe two years from now he’s the head writer of Mary Tyler Moore or some other goyim show, but no, not funny. If he comes in looking like shit, depressed, bleeding gums, lives in a furnished room—then there’s a chance.”
Mostly “the ear” provides his special talent free of charge to comics he likes. Richard Lewis tells the story of a usual session with George.
“I don’t have a car. So I got to take the damn train out there. The IND to the end of the line. It’s like a bad neighborhood on wheels. You get there alive, you’re already ahead of the game. One time I show up, and it’s the middle of the afternoon. Like fifty below zero, wind off the ocean, these Italian clam-opener guys standing around like they’re gonna tear your heart out and eat it. I knock on the door and George comes down in this green terry-cloth bathrobe. He squints out at the light, like he’s some kind of mole. Then sits down. Okay, he goes. That means you start doing your act. You do your bits, he sits there, doesn’t move a muscle, not a single facial expression.
“You finish a hunk and he says, ‘Funny.’ That’s it. Just ‘funny.’ No explanation, no commentary. Nothing. Just ‘funny.’ You do another bit. He listens. Again, no clue, a total stone face. ‘Not funny,’ he says. ‘What do you mean,’ I’m yelling, ‘not funny? I love this bit. It’s a fucking riot. He looks at me like I’m a bug. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I ain’t here to suck your dick. I’m here to tell you what you came to find out.’”
After Lewis thought about it awhile he concluded, as almost every comic who comes to see “the ear” eventually does, “That George was right.”
Comics for whom George offers “the ear” know what they’re getting. Every so often, the big names like Robert Klein and David Brenner, who make as much as $30,000 a week in Vegas, come by to do sets for the traditional $6.90 plus subway fare pay. The place is packed, everyone’s drunk, and George gets the money to stay in business another season.
Back in the day, George used to listen to all the comics who came into Pip’s. It didn’t matter if they were good or bad. “There was something about the process that thrilled me. Call it what you want but being a comic is an existential act. It takes risk. Like, if you get some kid up here and he’s a singer and he’s fucking awful people will say, Wow, that kid can’t sing at all. If a comic gets up and he’s rotten, the response is going to be, ‘What an asshole, I hate that mocky bastard.’ They want to murder you…. Comedy is personal that way. The stakes are high. If you do good you say you killed. If you do bad, you say you died. Kill or be killed. Simple as that.”
Now, though, George says, the drama has gone out of the laughing game. “Probably it’s TV but everyone more or less knows what a comic sounds like. They know how to pace their act, how to defuse hecklers. They have a safety net. That’s the way it is with everything now. You see a stock broker on TV, then at least you know how to talk like a stock broker. The gangsters watch the Godfather to learn how to talk like a gangster. Once I’d come down and didn’t know what the hell I was going to hear. It could be really terrible, just the worst shit you ever heard. Or it could be something totally new. Flat-out brilliant. Either way it would be interesting. Now hardly anyone is really bad, but hardly anyone is really good. I’d rather stay upstairs and jack off.”
This doesn’t mean strange nights don’t come up. “I get a lot of wannabes in here, you know,” George says. “There was this one guy, he’s like a candy salesman from Buffalo or somewhere. He comes to the City a couple times a year. Always calls me. ‘George! Let me stand-up! I got stuff that’s great. You’ll piss in your pants.’
“I always put him off. One time I guess I’m feeling kindly, or stupid, so I say, ‘Yeah, if you want to come in early do a few minutes.’ But I forgot that was the night my friend who teaches these adult slow learners is bringing his class in. I didn’t know what to tell the guy, so I just kept my mouth shut. He comes in, with this idiot Frank Fontaine hat on and squirting flower on his lapel, I kid you not. He does his five minutes or so, these terrible old jokes. But the slow learners—they love it. They’re cracking up every time he opens his mouth. They’ll laugh at anything. The guy gets off stage and he’s completely blitzed. ‘Did you hear them,’ he’s shouting. ‘They loved me. I killed!’ He goes back to Buffalo thinking he gets more laughs than Jack Benny. Now he keeps calling me. ‘George, I’m gonna be in. My shit’s even better now.’ I’m ducking him. I don’t have the heart to tell him: ‘You made retards laugh. That’s what you did, you fucking idiot.’”
These days with his sons taking over a lot of business of the club, George finds himself with more time to do a little fishing in the Bay, if you want to call reeling in a mutant eel fishing. Sometimes he’ll stroll around the now shuttered Lundy’s where the last reclusive Lundy brother used to live in the attic surrounded by a dozen Doberman pinchers he used to sic on bill collectors.
“Mostly I just walk around and blink,” Georg
e says. “The blinking, I don’t know where it came from. It starts like a twitch in my forehead, moves down to my eyes. It comes in patterns. Like blink, then blink, blink. I think maybe I’m sending Morse code only I don’t know to who. I could be sending out Paul Revere one-if-by-land-two-if-by-sea signals to aliens in flying saucers waiting for a sign to take over earth.”
George figures he’ll keep Pip’s until he croaks. Recently, in an attempt at upgrade, he put in a brunch menu. “It’s the only place in Brooklyn you can get brunch, whatever the hell that is.”
Just then a mah-jongg lady who said she’d been living in Sheepshead Bay since before Lundy’s walked by.
She said, “You had David Brenner, I hear.”
George said, “Yes, David Brenner.”
She said, “David Brenner, very good. David Brenner.”
George said, “David Brenner.”
She said, “David Brenner, I like him. On the TV, very funny.”
“David Brenner. He’s good.” Then the mah-jongg lady looked at George’s window where Marty had stenciled SUNDAY BRUNCH, SALADS QUICHES. And said, “So what’s a quitch?”
To which George said, “Quiche. Quiche.”
To which the lady said, “Quitch. I don’t know from this quitch.”
To which George turned and looked across Sheepshead Bay and blinked rapidly.
15
Wynton’s Game
Next to Bill Clinton, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is about the most charming man you’ll ever meet. No matter how busy he appears to be, he has all the time in the world to talk to you. His recall for small pleasantries, like remembering your birthday or the names of your children, is hard to beat. He also can play better than Clinton. For sure no jazzman, not Charlie Parker, not Duke Ellington, ever raised $130 million. The story of a modern Balanchine in full, but cool, glad-hand mode. From New York magazine, 2001.
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