Funnymen (9 page)

“Uncle Harry,” I said, “are you sure you just did the right thing?”

He said, “The right thing? No. The
right
thing would be to ship him off to a nuthouse, that would be the right thing. What we just did, Sally, was make sure we have our next few meals and a roof over our heads and can afford to be buried properly.
Which might be any day now!”

SNUFFY DUBIN [comedian]:
I was offered the emcee's job at the Mohican Club and I grabbed it. It was a good house, two hundred seats and the
three b's: bands, booze, and broads. Johnny Nelson's band was the house band, Tina Mitchell sang for them, and Benny Lampone was the owner on paper. But Big Al Pompiere and a few other Jersey characters were the real owners.

I met Ziggy at the Mohican and, man, we just
clicked.
Same age, same backgrounds—him from New York and me from Chicago—we grew up poor and my father was in show business too. He was a cantor—Pavarotti with
payess
, no shit. Ziggy and me were friends, but there was a mutual jealousy thing maybe too: you know, he was a performer already and was flat-out hilarious and he just destroyed people up there, so yeah, I envied that, sure. He was a comic genius, even at that age. See, some people, some comedians, they just have that raw comic instinct. They're born with it. Me, I had to work and work and teach myself that instinct.

But, yeah, jealousy. I was—back then, at least—a slim guy and there were girls around, and I went out and had a good time. I don't think that Ziggy had even kissed a girl yet.

Well, we fixed that.

Zig and I are hangin' at the bar one night and it's me, him, and this colored cat named Jimmy Powell. He cleaned up for us but let me tell you, that man could dress. Silk and satin all over the place and the fucking shiniest white shoes you ever saw, a real hepcat, and where he got the money for his threads . . . well, who knew?

It's way after hours and me and Zig are telling jokes and shooting the shit and the subject gets onto girls. As in, where do you get one in this town?

I told him, “Ziggy, it's four in the
A.M.—any
girl you get right now, you don't
wanna
get.”

“Oh yeah?” he says. “Then where is she?”

He looks down at the floor and that's when I realize, hey, this guy's never been within one foot of a broad. I call Jimmy Powell over. He's maybe forty-five years old and as skinny as a sewing needle.

We piled into my Hudson Essex Terraplane and Jimmy tells us where to go.

We ended up in Newark. It was really dark out, I remember that, and it's this neighborhood, warehouses and factories and not a soul on the street.

We get out of the car and walk into this building, like a three-story townhouse. It's a bordello. Big surprise, right? Well, it
was
a surprise because this was no rundown dingy whorehouse, this was a very, very flashy joint. Velvet all over the place, velvet curtains and rugs from Afghanistan or Persia, moldings in the wall, sconces and candelabras and gold lamps and furniture from eighteenth-century France.

There's a living room and it's wall-to-wall red velvet in there and there's about nine, ten chicks in it. Some of 'em, they're pretty—and I don't just
mean pretty for Newark at four in the morning. And they had the works on: pearl necklaces, merry widows, garters, the whole kit and caboodle.

Zig says to me, “You wanna go first, Snuffy?”

I tell him I think I'll pass.

“What about you, Jimmy?” he asks, and Jimmy Powell passed too.

I say to him, “Why don't you just do the job, Zig? It's late.”

So Ziggy paces up and down, gets an eyeful of these whores. And he went for the ugly duckling—he picked the ugliest one of them; this girl's flab had flab. They climbed the stairs and then me and Jimmy Powell waited on the couch and the chicks slowly filed out and went back to their knitting, working with the handicapped, and Bible study.

“Snuffy,” Jimmy said, “I don't think that boy's gonna know where to poke his stick.”

“Jimmy, if he can't figure it out, then you're going up there and telling him,” I say.

Two minutes later the broad who's runnin' the joint is flying down the stairs. A big gutsy blonde, like Dorothy Malone in her prime plus thirty pounds. And she's runnin' down the stairs and it's some big emergency.

Jimmy Powell asks her, “Alice, what's going on?”

“He's stuck,” Alice says. “The fat boy is stuck.”

I'll never forget that. It's one of those things you hear and it just stays with you. The fat boy is stuck. That's what you should call
The Ziggy Bliss Story,
Ted.
The Fat Boy Is Stuck.

Me and Jimmy run up the spiral stairs to the third floor. The pole that goes up the stairs, the newel? This thing was 100 percent pure marble and there were little carvings of naked broads with long tresses in it with serpents all around 'em, like from Greek myths. Alice is running behind us and she tells us room number seven. So me and Jimmy open the door to room number seven.

The very first thing I see is Ziggy's big ass. This big red medicine ball and it's shakin' like raspberry Jell-O in a hurricane.

“Is that you, Snuffy?” he asks me.

I tell him, Yeah it's me, and that Jimmy Powell's here too.

“I can't get out, Snuff. I'm, like,
lodged.”

“Goddamn, man,” Jimmy Powell whispers to me.

Alice asks the girl underneath Zig if she can breathe, and she says, yeah, she can breathe but not really too good.

Alice tells me and Jimmy to get Zig out of there. I say to her,
“What do we do, call the fucking fire department for this?!”
I mean, Jesus Christ . . .

“We could try just givin' him the heave-ho,” Jimmy says.

And that's what we did . . . I take one leg and Jimmy Powell takes the other and we tried to dislodge him. But there was no give . . . it wasn't
working. And we were really trying too—we rolled up our sleeves and planted our feet and did it on the count of three. But no dice. And then Alice gets all the other girls and now you've got me and Jimmy and ten hookers and we're tugging on Ziggy's arms and feet and there's just no way to extricate him. And now, hey, the idea of calling the fire department isn't really too outlandish all of a sudden.

“I got an idea,” Jimmy Powell says, and before you know it we're all tying velvet curtains and bedsheets together. Yankee ingenuity at its finest. Jimmy flings this makeshift rope of curtains and sheets out the window, and then me and him go downstairs to my Terraplane. We tie one end of the rope thing to the rear fender, and upstairs Alice and her harem tie the other end around Ziggy's waist.

We're in the car and I start it up and press down on the accelerator. We don't move. I'm really gunnin' it and the wheels are spinning and we're kickin' up dust. Finally I just floor the sonuvabitch and—my hand to God—from upstairs in that house I hear a sound like a fifty-gallon bottle of champagne being popped open.
POP!!!
And me and Jimmy Powell look back up and, Jesus Christ, my Hudson damn near pulled Ziggy Blissman straight out the window too.

We go back upstairs and the poor kid—I mean, it's his first time with a girl and there's ten people standing around him and he's naked and all red and everything—he's shaking and almost in tears. I got an eyeful of Ziggy's
shvantz
, I couldn't believe it . . . it was like a goddamn baseball bat. Which was, I guess, the problem to begin with.

So he gets dressed now and me and him and Jimmy Powell and Alice are at the front door and the sun is coming up over Newark.

And this, I'll never forget. We're about to leave and Jimmy Powell reaches into his pants and pulls out a wad of bills and hands about fifty bucks to Alice and tells her to take good care of the girl. And then he looks at me and says, “That fat boy don't ever come to this house again, you understand?!”

So I guess Jimmy Powell was runnin' the joint, which is how he had all them fine threads.

• • •

GUY PUGLIA:
The band finked out on us too. Vic and me, we tried to round 'em all up. But it was funny how they was all “out” that day. I called the trumpeter and his wife tells me, “His brother in Omaha died. He's in Omaha.” I called the trombone fella and his wife says, “Oh,
his
brother in Omaha died today too.” Three dead brothers in Omaha later, we get the message. Vic had no band.

One day at a Red Sox game, Vic says to me, “So we gotta go back to Codport, huh?”

“And what are we gonna do in Codport?” I ask him.

“I guess we tote fish,” he answers.

“You wanna tote fish, Vic? Is that what you wanna do?”

So that night we hopped a Greyhound to New York.

I had a cousin, Gino Puccio—he worked the desk at the old Monroe Hotel on Forty-ninth, just off Broadway. The Monroe at this time was on its way down. And it didn't have too far to go either 'cause I don't think it had ever had its way up.

KATHY PUCCIO [wife of Guy Puglia's cousin]:
One night we're having dinner at our house [in Long Beach, Long Island], Gene, me, and the kids, and there's a knock at the door. My son, Paulie, gets the door—in those days you didn't have to look through the peephole—and there is this tall well-built guy in a blue suit and right next to him is this short fellow, not much bigger than Paulie, who was maybe nine at the time.

“Mom, there's a man with blue hair at the door,” Paulie said. And for some reason my daughter, Theresa, runs into her bedroom and closes the door. She was sixteen.

“Gino
baby!”
Guy says.

“Is that my Cousin Gaetano?” my husband says.

“Hey, Pooch,” Guy says.

And they hug and pinch each other's cheeks. And not a minute later our guests are sitting down with us, and Vic and Paulie are boxing with each other—you know, just screwing around—at the table. Vic and Guy wolfed down about ten pounds of food in thirty seconds.

GUY PUGLIA:
You had all kinds staying at the Monroe. Hookers, drunks, junkies, freaks, crackpots who thought the world had five minutes to live, musicians and hepcats and vaudeville wash-ups, burlesque girls, actors on their way up, actors who'd already come down. More ambulances pulled up to that joint than taxis, that's the truth. Walking down them long hallways you saw things that'd curl your hairs quick. People injecting junk with the doors open, men dressed up as women—that wasn't even abnormal after a while. Some guy left the door open and I saw two ostriches prancing around the room. Ostriches!

The idea was to get some work. Vic didn't want to do nothing but sing. But me, I'd do anything. Gino'd been working the desk for almost fifteen years—he had to go by the name of “Eugene Purcell,” by the way; that was the name on his uniform—and he knew a lot of Broadway people. He said he'd try and help Vic out. In the meantime I got a waiter job at Handelman's
on Fifty-first Street. And a week or so after that, Vic got a job too, working three days a week. Doing what, you may ask? He was working at a soda fountain on Broadway and Eighty-first Street. A soda jerk again.

KATHY PUCCIO:
Vic and Guy would stay with us a few days and then, when I started to complain about how much they were eating, Gene would sneak them into the hotel for a few days. Guy had gotten a job after a while but Vic would just hang around in the house. Eventually I got him to help me clean up.

My son loved Vic. They hit it off. My husband worked at night, came home at five in the morning, slept till noon, but Vic would spend time with my Paulie . . . they'd play baseball, stickball, handball, all that stuff. Theresa eventually overcame her shyness, but at first she never said a word to either Guy or Vic. I remember one dinner we were having, Theresa's best friend Betty was eating with us . . . I looked over to Theresa and noticed she was staring at Vic. I kicked her under the table and she said, “Ouch!” A minute later she's staring again. So I snatched the napkin off her lap and sort of whipped her arm with it. Then I looked over to Betty and saw she was ogling Vic too.