‘HERDUM PROFANUM’

stage play/screenplay

Back in the days when The Blarney Stone stood sentinel-like and ‘wanting’ in Hell’s Kitchen, N.Y., (W. 48th and Ninth Ave.) my soul became enthralled with the lives of several barflies I came to know as friends. Or, noble stool dogs and dirty sods who burned their lives o’way on regret n’ shame for sins they likely committed beyond what could be considered ‘voluntary;’ more of a divine dictate if ya’ ask me anyway was their miserable descent into drunken madnesses. Ya see folks, some men simply cannot void ol’ Mother Fate for she plays a rigged game of Monty, you know, the three-card shuffle grift that once plagued Times Square where tourists lost their dinner money on trying to follow the elusive Red Queen. She was a randy bitch that Queen was when I watched the black boys mostly use sleight of hand ever so ‘slightly’ n’ expertly akin to any legit magician’s technique of rapid fire misdirection and agility.

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(The ABOVE LINK takes you to a video logo for REBELRAVENBOOKS first displayed on earlier media platforms)

(…excerpt from the novel ‘THE BLARNEY BOYS’ (A Hell’s Kitchen Tale)/published in final version – C. 2016:

‘Ode To Blarney’

‘Blarney O’ Blarney m’ abode of fancy

in the kitchen of Hell she’s a den of necromancy

for a sinner’s soul of th’ ravens blood lot

she’ll take ya back to a time ya nevuh’ fo’got

be ya flyerman, hobo, or wannabe saint

no mattuh’ ya mask leave it to Her n’ you ain’t

nuthin’ more than an old face clothed wit’ the new

if’in ya ignore the past she’ll be sure to show you

a memory to smell, one, two, p’raps three

‘ave a pint pon Her bosom ‘cept what was ain’t free,

price to recall a lick wimble’s means

when th’ Blarney seeks ya ancients fall to ya knees

N’ order anothuh’ round of your favorite gut rot

cuz She gonna make you remembuh’ what you shoulda

Fo’got…!’

One of the more iconic images in the novel THE BLARNEY BOYS (A Hell’s Kitchen Tale) is William ‘Bela’ Smith in the men’s toilet imagining the arm of a little girl rising from the rusty drain to grab him! His past, returning to claim truths…and so much more!

Writing this piece I’m compelled to honor the men I wrote about in the book – William ‘Bela’ Smith, Dunbar Clay, Chester Toliver, David Th’ Tooth, Louis ‘Nutsy’ Damiano and the Jesuit Fr. Frederick Nabaret who ran the church and soup kitchen on the West Side that sheltered these weary noble scuggers . The characters I created in the book were loosely based on drunks I knew quite well when we all gathered and sucked gut rot daily at our wayward home o’way from home, the Blarney Stone – my sloppy womb where I was reborn into a dedicated and reliably successful alcoholic. However, let’s be clear – I was not the type of drinker who swore and oath to the porcelain gargoyle forcing me into rehab, a hospital ward, asylum, or jail cell. I simply drank Guinness pints with boiled eggs chased by a few boilermakers on regular Saturday nights. I was never a five day a week nine to five gutter rat. I binged then took time off to enjoy the staples of life – the routine bullshit of a job, girlfriend, buddies, and those rancid film/tv/theater auditions all of us thespian’oids succumbed to.

Being a writer, I liked sitting in the Blarney bar on cozy summer, Fall, and especially rainy days sipping gut rot and eating beer nuts from a wooden bowl. The air was haunted with the rotting lives of so many weary men and women that I sat beside scribing at a table or at the counter as if enslaved by an invisible master – their aromas of memories. To this day, there’s never been a period of time when I wasn’t remembering those days in Hell’s Kitchen ‘writing my wares’, so to say, about lowly men I had come to respect as hominids who at one time were happy family men; but bad luck or karmic destiny they ended up drunkards trapped in regret and shame over too much loss, mental illness, or both. There was a Klondike poet my father turned me onto when I was at the New School for Social Research/NYC, Robert Service, whom I enjoyed very much. Then, a wino down by Washington Square Park I met oddly gave me a collection of Service’s poetry (he seemed to have adored Service) – that copy I still have today in the Vermont house. I’ll end this brief rant about the Blarney and say that Service influenced my sense of Fate when one of his poems, ‘The Men That Don’t Fit In,’ about hobos and eternal wanderers on life’s dark road who lived their lives by halves, infected my soul. I offer the fourth stanza here because it’s who I became against my own will; then again, free will to choose or predestination, I did in fact turn into a man I didn’t wish to be:

(…excerpt:)

And each forgets, as he strips and runs

    With a brilliant, fitful pace,

It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones

    Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,

    Forgets that his prime is past,

Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,

    In the glare of the truth at last.

‘Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead, in the glare of the truth at last,’ man o’ man, what a brilliant fuckin’ line. I won’t say more at this time about the poem, suffice it to say, if there was any man who simply didn’t fit in I am he. From the moment I had first read Service’s poems and having access to the Blarney for over four years, the self-identifying with the men I drank and wrote about with passion was in a way my own biography to come. Such is life, ey – a zero sum game. We all lose.

The mid to late 1980s were difficult times in the city when Disney Corp and Mayors Dickins and then Juliani were tasked to clean up the West Side with heavy focus on Times Square – by the 80s, TS had become a worse cesspool than it in the past.

In the late 1980s, oh, 1987-1991/’92, I lived on West 46th Street between 10th and 11th Ave., a few blocks from the West Side Highway or the FDR. In those days I was a struggling actor and writer working the horrid nightshift (11p-8a) at the local HESS GAS STATION along Tenth Ave. If the Blarney Stone was a birth then the Hess station also became a safe landscape for me to carve some fiction in the middle of the night when the incessant traffic coming and going for gas, oil, and cigarettes, waned. In the storage room adjacent to the men’s and ladies bathrooms, I would sit for two hours if lucky and write in notebooks and on thick paper towels the story that would eventually become my screenplay and stage play, and later the award-winning Indy Film, ‘OSCAR PHITKIN’ (A Vendor’s Tale). In fact, the last shots of the film show me playing the older hot dog vendor, Oscar, standing in a doorway smoking by his cart as the v.o. narration recites that fourth verse of Service’s poem from ‘The Men That Don’t Fit In.’

(stay tuned for MORE history on Hell’s Kitchen in the days when S.W. Laro began his writing journey)