All summer, I've been wasting my Sunday afternoons in the shady bits of Prospect Park. There's nowhere more shady—in every sense of the word—than the peculiar little corner known as the Vale of Cashmere. For Narratively, producer Emily Kwong and I dug into the Vale's history, for a short piece on WNYC.
If you liked it, thank Emily. She's a genius. I just like to talk.
Today at Narratively, I break out of my baseball niche to dig into historical crime of a different sort. Lee Morgan has always been one of my favorite postwar jazz musicians, but until I started reading up on him I had no idea about the heartbreaking story of his life and death.
On an icy night in 1967, one of the world's greatest trumpeters didn't own a trumpet. His horn was in the pawnshop, along with his winter coat, sold to pay for heroin. Three years after releasing one of the most successful jazz albums of the 1960s, Lee Morgan was in the depths of a drug habit that had consumed him for nearly a decade. Even if he'd had a trumpet, he was so out of practice that he could barely play. That was the night he met the woman who would save his life.
A transplant from North Carolina, the woman who would become Helen Morgan was known in jazz circles as "the little hip square." She didn't touch heroin, but her apartment was a refuge for struggling musicians, including many addicts. After the clubs had closed, "Helen's Place" was somewhere to get warm and get fed. On that particular cold night, she says in "The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan," Morgan came by, "raggedy and pitiful…and for some kind of reason, my heart just went out to him.
"I said, 'Child, it's zero degrees out there and all you have is a jacket. Where is your coat?'"
"In hock," he said. She got the coat back for him, along with his trumpet, and like a lost puppy, he followed her home. From then on, she said, "he hung on to me," and in turn she "took over total control" of Lee Morgan, helping the onetime prodigy grow into the musician he was meant to be. Helen would get him well, she would get him working, and five years later, she would end his life.
"She was a sucker for people who were suckers," says Larry Reni Thomas, author of "The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan." "He was a sucker for heroin."
It starts ugly and gets uglier. You'll like it.
I've spent much of the last few weeks with my head floating around in an imaginary version of New Orleans, editing stories for Narratively's week on the Crescent City. We have some really lovely stories up there, none closer to my heart than the one I spent entirely too long working on, about a Storyville murder that has largely been forgotten. We'll see if I can fix that.
Ever since the first flatboat sailor came down the Mississippi, loaded with cash and rotgut whiskey, New Orleans has been wary of outsiders. On Easter Sunday, 1913, a trio of New Yorkers learned that lesson well, when they found themselves in the center of a gunfight that forever altered the nation's most famous red light district. Driving the chaos was a man named Charles Harrison, better known as Gyp the Blood.
After the shooting, Harrison got his picture in the paper, under the headline "Harrison Bad Man." The Daily Picayune described him as a cold-blooded killer with a cocaine habit and a sideline in white slavery, but the picture does not match the crimes. About thirty years old at the time, Harrison is shown as soft-featured, with a bulging nose and an awkward smile. In his left hand, this "man of evil days and black surroundings" clutches a small white dog.
"He was spruce," the Daily Picayune would later write, "even dapper in appearance, as far as clothes went, but his pale, smooth-shaven face, bulging at the eyes, caving into sunken cheeks and squaring into a brutal jaw, bore the cold, steely cast of unregenerate impulse to crime."
Gyp the Blood was a hardened criminal of the Lower East Side. Or perhaps he was a fake, a coward who killed a man to prove he wasn't scared. He was a dupe, tricked by his employers into throwing his life away. Or he was a wild man, whose itchy trigger finger caused a bloodbath, and ruined business for hundreds of law-abiding purveyors of vice.
In the photograph, all Harrison seemed to want was to show off his puppy.
If you like that, there's about 5,000 words more. Eat it up—it's juicy.
And while I'm posting clips, there are two more that I was too busy—read: lazy—to share with you good people. Ze first comes from Narratively, one in a collection of vignettes about the pains, horror and strife that come with dating. It's an incredibly embarrassing story from an incredibly embarrassing time: the middle of my freshman year of college.
It seemed I was the only person on campus not getting laid hourly during my freshman year at NYU. The trouble was a steadfast commitment to a long distance girlfriend whom I loved too much to cheat on.
Long distance relationships are tricky because long distance sex is unfeasible, for now. So I dreamed up a Valentine’s Day surprise to return to her bed as soon as possible.
She expected me back in Nashville late February 14th, but I decided to cut class and go home a day early. I’d tell her to step outside her house, where I would be waiting for hugs and kisses. It would blow her goddamned mind.
You'll never guess it, but complications ensue. While I'm bothered by the Narratively editors insistance on splitting my work up into tiny little paragraphs, I think the story turned out well. They're fun dudes to work for, and I'm hoping to do more of it in the future.
The second post is another one at Bullett, this time about the already-forgotten controversy over historical inaccuracy in Lincoln. It's mostly worth it for the alliteration of "Kushner Krushes Kongressman." At the end, I reach some conclusions about the truth, which I hate.
It’s silly to demand accuracy in film. The IMDB comments section for your average historical drama is populated by whinging history buffs who don’t understand that movies are not supposed to be textbooks. Anything that must be sacrificed for the sake of the story should be sacrificed. When I first heard of Courtney’s ire, I was naturally sympathetic. It seems like such an easy thing to get right, and Lincoln’s grotesque run time turned me against the movie long ago. But Kushner has a way with words, and he talked me into it. If he changed those votes on purpose, then he had a good reason. The historical record is meaningless. Storytelling is king.
Enjoy your Tuesday, you wonderful literate person, you.
Since November, I've been working on a long feature for Narratively about Dick Zigun, self-proclaimed "mayor of Coney Island," and his arts group, Coney Island USA. Best known as the man who invented the Mermaid Parade, Zigun is a charismatic, bombastic and occasionally divisive figure whose life's work was mangled by Hurricane Sandy. I was turned on to the story by Ginny Louloudes, of ART/NY, and spent the next few months hanging around the Boardwalk, interviewing artists, and devouring the unbelievably readable Coney Island: Lost And Found.
Want the lede? I'll give it to you for free. The rest of it, well, you can get that for free too.
Dick Zigun was ready for a two-foot flood. In three decades at Coney Island, every hurricane he had seen blew through like a tourist passing the boardwalk on its way up the coast—and he was not afraid of Sandy. Rather than evacuate, he spent the night at home on West Fifteenth Street, a few blocks from the water, his pick-up parked outside in case of emergency. By the time he realized emergency was here, it was too late to run.
“When the flood came, it came fast,” says Zigun. “When I saw water pouring in under the door, over the sandbags, the water was already knee-high in the street.”
Fearing the flood might knock him over, he waded across the road to take shelter in a friend’s second-story apartment. From the second floor, they watched the water—three feet high and rising. Four. Five.
Dick Zigun, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Coney Island”
When the tide ebbed after midnight, Zigun, a grizzled fifty-nine year-old, went home to grab something he’d forgotten in his hurry: his cat. He found Buddy floating on his mattress, safe and dry, but “a little freaked out.”
“He saved my expensive goose down comforter,” Zigun says. “He had gathered it up around him, so it wasn’t soaking wet, and he was warm. I grabbed the cat, grabbed my prescription medicine, grabbed my iPhone charger—you know, the essentials of life.”
For a moment, Zigun wasn’t thinking about Coney Island USA, the arts organization, sideshow and museum he founded in 1980. Since then, he has thought of nothing else. Long one of the most visible artists in South Brooklyn, the self-proclaimed “mayor of Coney Island” rules from Surf Avenue, where he has turned a ninety-five year-old restaurant building into the artistic heart of the amusement district. But since the storm, where once stood a bar, a theater and an ice cream parlor, nothing remains but “a big fucking mess.”
At 3,700 words, the resultant story is the longest journalism thing I've ever written, and I think it's turned out pretty well. (The second-longest was the time I spent two weeks pretending to know enough about the legal system to cover a very colorful court battle in Long Island. It sneaked onto the cover of the Observer because it happened to run the week the editor in chief got fired. Timing is everything!)
The pictures above don't have anything to do with the story, but I took them a couple of weeks ago, on my last day doing interviews at Coney. The one of the guy with the metal detector makes me so happy, you can't even imagine.
Have I mentioned lately how hungry I am for summer? I've been checking this website so often, it might as well be my homepage.
Regular readers may have noticed that, for all its high points, Astor Place Riot is not known for crusading journalism. I'm generally more interested in writing about celebrity Christmas trees and infant thieves. But this month I started writing for the lovely new website Narratively—a longform publication more interested in my reporting ability than my gibberish-typing. "Very well," I said. "You want non-gibberish? I'll give you non-gibberish!"
I'd always been heart-warmed by the Autism Theater Initiative, a program of the Theater Development Fund that has, at matinees of The Lion King and Mary Poppins, specially tailored productions to meet the needs of those on the autism spectrum. It's a feel-good charity that's actually good for everyone involved—producers included—and thinking about it gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling that writing about theater usually does not produce.
The story went online this morning, along with a spectacular short video by photographer/videodude Emon Hassan. (Whose web series The Third is creepy and excellent, btw.) Here's the lede:
At a matinee of the Broadway show “Elf” on January 5, the audience was oddly restless. When the curtain rose, revealing a rosy-cheeked Wayne Knight wearing a white-and-red suit, a girl screamed, “Hi Santa!” followed by a boy’s cry of ”Quiet!” During the first dance number, as a line of elves popped off tiny little kicks, a child ran down the aisle and pelted a squishy toy at one of the dancers. Without missing a step, the elf made a one-handed catch. Throughout the first act, the audience grew increasingly noisy, but the actors, impressively, remained locked-in.
“There’s no sound like a theater full of autistic people,” says leading elf Jordan Gelber. “It was non-stop, except when there was music or a song. Then it was like all the sounds died away.”
This audience, made up entirely of people on the autism spectrum and their families, was there because of the Theatre Development Fund, a sprawling charity whose Autism Theatre Initiative has been producing afternoons like this since 2011. Several times a year, TDF turns a normally staid Broadway house into an autistic child’s paradise. Once you get used to the noise, you realize this is the happiest Broadway audience you’ve ever seen.
If you liked those words, there are about 1,300 more of them waiting for you over at Narratively. I'm proud of most of the work I do, but I'd say this is one that I feel extra-good about. Read it! Reread it! Tell your friends! And if your friends don't care...make them listen.
A site I've been doing some work for, Narratively, solicited their writers this week for stories about all-nighters. I picked over my brain, looking for memories of all the times in college when I partied 'till dawn, and was finally forced to conclude that partying 'till dawn was just not something I did. 'Till 3, maybe, but seldom dawn.
But then I remembered—all night stories don't have to be fun. In fact, it's better if they aren't! So I sharpened my brain-pencil and got to work telling the story of one of the dumbest things I've ever done, which started with an all-nighter and ended in anguish on the Jamaica LIRR platform.
No matter how neatly they rhyme, don’t trust friends who say, “Early flight? Stay up all night!”
Leaving New York after my freshman year at NYU, I booked an eight a.m. flight and was foolish enough to let my best friend turn my ordeal into a party. With the graceless vigor of those young enough to still have a metabolism, we threw ourselves into an all-nighter fueled by Talking Heads, lamb gyros and the world’s worst Manhattans—an abominable mix of Canadian whiskey and dry vermouth that only a freshman could love. But my friends fell well short of greeting the dawn.
“It’s past two,” they whined. “We’re going to bed.”
Half-drunk and fully alone, I put aside my wistfulness and whirlwinded around the apartment, cramming my crap into any bit of luggage that could hold it. Just before dawn, I staggered out of my dorm for the last time, dragging two rolling suitcases, a three-ton duffel and a Duane Reade bag full of sneakers. Unable to carry my Totally Awesome dorm room posters, I left them behind, and my dorm rooms were never Totally Awesome again. I hailed a cab for JFK and slipped into sleep.
It gets a lot dumber from there. There are nine or so other stories on that page, and they're all doosies. Mine is at the bottom presumably because it provides the kind of moral weight that you want to close a piece with.
The neatest thing, really, is that the good folks at Narratively solicited an illustration from a woman who works at Hatch Show Print, a letterpress shop that can only be called a Nashville institution. I fantasize about one day having a play produced in Nashville—Dark Horse theater producers, if you're reading this, call me—and to see my name in Hatch's big, beautiful, blocky letters. Being illustrated by a Hatch employee will tide me over for now.
I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.
In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:
One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."
Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.
Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.
More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."
A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.
That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.
Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"
Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.
Front page art courtesy Brendan Leach.
