It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (5 page)

Next thing I knew, I was having a drink with a young girl—about twenty-five—and an old man, about seventy. We were sitting there talking for a few minutes when the guy said, “Look, here’s the situation: I’m too old to do anything sexually, but my girl would like to. I only live two blocks from here. When your show is over, come back to my place. You can be with the girl—she likes you—and you’ll both have a good time.”

I was thinking,
What kind of a weird thing are they into?
But the guy looked harmless, and she looked hot, so I decided to go for it.

After my show, we all went back to his apartment, and the girl and I went into the bedroom. I closed the door, and we got undressed. But before we got into bed, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being set up, so I opened the door and took a peek outside. The old guy was just sitting in the living room, reading the paper.

I closed the door and wow, did I get lucky! From then on, that girl and I didn’t say another word—our tongues were too busy.

Thank you, show business.

By the way, it may seem like I’m getting a lot of girls, but remember, this is over a period of sixty years.

They took a survey: “Why do men get up in the middle of the night?” Ten percent get up to go to the bathroom and 90 percent get up to go home.

Chapter Three

Plans for Conquering the World

This girl was fat. I hit her with my car.
She asked me, “Why didn’t you go
around me?” I told her, “I didn’t have
enough gas.” I mean fat. She was
standing alone. A cop told her to break
it up. She stepped on a scale, a card
came out. It said
One at a time.

W
hen I was a kid, comedians were real characters. I remember a most unusual “gentleman” named B. S. Pully. I’d heard plenty about B. S. Pully before I met him. People said he was a low-class, filthy, dirty, funny maniac. When I met Pully, I learned that they had all been too nice.

I was eighteen, hanging around New York at night trying to learn about show business. I can’t remember how it happened, but I wound up in an amateur contest in a nightclub on Fifty-second Street. B. S. Pully was the master of ceremonies.

I entered the contest as a singer.

When it was my turn to go on, Pully said, “Our next contestant is gonna sing for us. Give a hand to Jack Roy.”

I walked onto the stage and stood next to Pully, who, in a voice that sounded like someone shoveling gravel, said, “What song you gonna sing, kid?”

I said, “‘You Are Always in My Heart.’”

Pully said, “All right, kid. I’ll be in your ass later.”

Years later I was working in a New York nightclub
called the Living Room. It was a popular place, and all the acts liked to work there, but it was a very small room, and everyone could hear everything. In the middle of my act one night, a phone rang in the audience.

Ring
…

“Hello,” said Pully in his gravel voice.

Everybody in the audience turned to listen to Pully, so I just stopped my act and stood there.

Then we all heard Pully say, “I told you not to call me here, you rat bastard! The show is on!” Then he hung up the phone and said, “Go ahead, kid.”

One night Pully was at a fancy social function. How he got in I’ll never know. Anyway, he asked one of the prominent society women to dance. She accepted, not knowing that Pully had taped a Coca-Cola bottle to the inside of his right thigh. As he was dancing, he would look straight into the woman’s eyes and dip so that the woman’s thigh would rub up against the bottle.

For the rest of the dance, Pully just kept staring at her, cool as can be, occasionally doing his famous dip. Years later, B. S. Pully appeared in the movie
Guys and Dolls
. He played Big Julie.

When Pully did his act in a nightclub, another gentleman often joined him. This guy called himself H. S. Gump. That’s right—Bull Shit Pully and Horse Shit Gump.

After the nightclubs would shut down for the night, many of the acts would hang out at Kellogg’s Cafeteria on Forty-ninth Street. One night we were all sitting at a table having an early breakfast and Gump, who was drunk, said loudly, “Where’s the salt?”

My friend Martin handed Gump the salt and said, “You want the pepper, too?”

Gump said, “Fuck the pepper.”

“If you fuck the pepper,” Martin said, “your cock will sneeze.”

Martin had a strange sense of humor. His full name was Martin Nadell. He invented Jumble, the scrambled-word game, which has nothing to do with this next story. I was working in a nightclub in the Bronx called the Red Mill. Opening night, in the middle of my act, the next act—a stripper who worked with fire—came walking through the audience, heading backstage, carrying her lit torches. The audience saw the girl with the fire, and forgot all about me. You might say it was distracting.

After the show, I knocked on her dressing-room door. When she opened the door, I asked her if she’d wait until she was backstage to light her torches.

She got very huffy. “Don’t tell me what to do!” she said. “I fuck you! I fuck everybody!”

A short while later, there was another knock on her door. She opened it, and Martin was standing there naked.

She said, “What the hell is this?”

Martin said, “You said you fuck everybody, so I figured I’d be first.”

I tell ya, I got no sex life. My dog watches me in the bedroom. He wants to learn how to beg. He also taught my wife how to roll over and play dead.

I
n the forties and fifties, Hansen’s Drugstore at Fifty-first Street and Broadway in New York was where every kind of performer hung out during the day—actors, actresses, comedians, tightrope walkers, whatever you wanted. They were all there in the afternoon, talking show business and perfecting their plans for conquering the world.

There were many colorful characters there, but we all agreed that the most colorful was a guy called Tootsie.

He got that name because he was always singing an impression of Al Jolson. He would sing, “Toot-Toot-Tootsie, good-bye, Toot-Toot-Tootsie, don’t cry…”

Tootsie told everybody he was a big, big agent. He would sit down at your table, open a large portfolio, and show you pictures of his big clients. The first one was a publicity shot of Van Johnson. Tootsie would say, “Van Johnson. Nice boy to have in your stable, right?” Then he’d turn the page. “Who’s this? Ginger Rogers. Good girl to have under contract. We’re very close, you know, very close.” Next would be Clark Gable. He’d say, “Oh, what a guy. We’ve been together over thirty years.”

And he’d continue to roll out these pictures of the biggest stars of the day and say things like, “I’m getting her a three-picture deal at Paramount…” or, “He’s going to headline in London for a month…”

Often he would walk up to a comic and say, “Are you available on September twenty-fourth for two weeks?”

The guy’d say, “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Tootsie’d say, “I’ll get back to you. I think I got something good for you.”

Then he’d turn to the next fellow and say, “Are you open October first for a weekend in Pittsburgh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. I’ll get back to you…”

He never got back to anyone. But that was okay—everyone knew that he was out of his mind.

Next door to Hansen’s Drugstore was a small restaurant called B&G. They had handmade signs advertising their food Scotch-taped all over their windows. In that neighborhood, just a couple of blocks north of Times Square, there were always a lot of out-of-towners walking around, taking in the sights of New York. They’d stop and look at the signs, and if they liked what they saw, maybe they’d come in to eat.

To have a few laughs, we’d make up our own signs and tape them over the real ones. Ours would say,
BEST FUCKIN’ HAMBURGER IN TOWN
! or
OUR SOUP WILL KNOCK YOU ON YOUR ASS
! Then we’d stand on the corner and watch the tourists’ reactions.

That was our excitement for the day. That’s what you do when you can’t get a job in show business.

I was an ugly kid. My mother breast-fed me through a straw.

Chapter Four

Very Naked from the Waist Up

My wife and I, our relationship
is on and off. Every time I get
on, she tells me to get off.

W
hen you’re starting out in show business, you go through many frustrating experiences. Today I can think back and laugh, but at the time, it was serious business.

I was working a club on Long Island once. The show consisted of me and three gay guys who had a dance act. The lead dancer was named Paris, and he had talent. In fact, he was the whole act—the other two just hung on for the ride.

After the second night’s show, the boss put his arm around me and said, “Jack, I like you very much, you son of a gun. I want you to come back next weekend. You’ll work Friday and Saturday again.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You just made a comic happy.”

He said, “Come with me. I wanna talk to the dance act.”

We walked over to the dancers. The boss still had his arm over my shoulder, still telling me how great I was. When we got to the dancers, he said to Paris, “I’m bringing Jack back next Friday and Saturday.” He smiled at me and said, “I love you, you son of a gun.” Then he told Paris, “I’d like you to work with Jack, but I can’t use the other two guys in your act. I want you to work alone.”

Paris stood up and said, “We’re an act. We don’t break up.”

The boss said, “You don’t break up, huh?” He then took his hand off my shoulder and said, “Jack, you’re out.”

I had a date with an inflatable girl. Now I got an inflatable guy looking for me.

W
hen I was twenty-one, I worked at a nightclub in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The show consisted of me as the comic emcee and a stripper named Virginia Kinn. After the first show there was a knock on my dressing-room door. In walks Virginia, very upset and very naked from the waist up. She said the boss had told her to cover her nipples during her act because he was worried about the vice squad.

She told me this was a huge problem for her because she had four high-rolling friends coming for the second
show. “They’re driving an hour and a half to get here,” she said, “and if they don’t get to see my nipples, they’ll be very disappointed.”

It was hard for me to believe what I was hearing. And due to her attire, it was hard for me to really
hear
what she was saying, so I just stood there mumbling things like, “I’m sorry…Oh, really?…Uh…You were saying…?”

The whole time she was talking, I never thought of coming on to her. I figured, what would she want with me? She had guys with big money driving a hundred miles just to see her nipples.

As it turned out, everything was okay. Her friends started drinking, and never missed her nipples. Virginia was relieved, but I wasn’t.

She was a wild girl. I took her to a bar. She gave the mechanical bull her phone number
.

I
n those days, I never knew when or where sex would pop up. One night, I was on the subway going home after a show. It was late, about three in the morning, but when I got off at my stop, I noticed that a girl was following me. I wasn’t afraid of some little girl, so I went up to her, and we started talking. After a few minutes of conversation, it was clear that she wanted us to get together, so we went to
an isolated place behind a monument in the park nearby and did it. When we were done, we went our separate ways.

On the way home, I suddenly became worried, because I didn’t use a rubber, so I went to a hospital across the street. I asked to see a doctor, and a woman in a white coat came out. I told her I’d rather see a male doctor, but she assured me that she was a real doctor and that I had no reason to be concerned because she was a woman.

Well, I thought I had
plenty
of reason to be concerned, but I had no choice, so I told her about my “one-monument stand” earlier that night and said that I was worried about catching something. She had me take my pants off, and she looked at my penis, then took a hold of it to examine it more closely. At that point I started to get excited, which she pretended not to notice.

After this extremely intimate examination, she told me I could put my pants back on. “Nothing to worry about,” she said. “You’re okay.”

I said, “So are you. What time do you start work tomorrow?”

I said to a girl I’d been seeing, “Come home with me, honey, and I’ll show you where it’s at.” She said, “You’d better, because the last time I couldn’t find it.”

People talk about safe sex. To me, safe sex is when all the car doors are locked and her husband is dead
.