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.
When 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.
In 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.