American Gangster (30 page)

A recent visit to the First National Bank in question, now a Citibank, reveals that Patty Huston is well remembered. Asked about the robbery, Mr. Garcia, the dapper bank manager, shrugged and said, “I don't know, this bank get robbed many times.” But shown a picture of Patty Huston, Garcia's eyes widened. “Oh …
him
. He's the reason we have this,” he says. And points to the bulletproof glass between the tellers and the customers.

By rights, the bank bust should have been all she wrote for Patty. But not quite. Patty soon jumped four flights out of an open window at the Old West Detention House near Sheridan Square. He broke his ankle in the fall, yet still he managed to escape, on St. Paddy's Day, no less. This was in 1975 and he hasn't been seen or heard from by the blueshirts since.

Nowadays, the FBI has at least one agent in each of its fifty-nine regional office trying to nail Patty Huston, who's stayed in the Top 10 of escaped federal prisoners for twenty-four straight months. The feds have chased leads to Texas, Florida, Canada, and even Ireland. This pisses the FBI off because as most agents will tell you, the Top 10 list doesn't necessarily about how dangerous a person is, but rather how famous he is—or how hard he, or she, is to catch. In other words, the fugitive's capacity to embarrass the bureau by staying at large.

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.

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. The 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.