The 42nd Street Jerking-Off Club-Out Now!

Another masterpiece of Times Square in its gay heyday by the two-time Lambda Award winning author!

I looked out the window on to 42nd Street. The crowd was still walking up and down the crazy, forgotten boulevard. Prostitutes, transvestites, hookers and hustlers of every sort paraded and marched back and forth on the hectic sidewalk, looking for another trick as they struggled through the dawning hours.

Where would they sleep it off tonight, some shabby Single Room Occupancy where they could just pass out for a few hours of troubled sleep, or in a lavish soft Park Avenue apartment where they could relax and laze in the lovely passing warm morning hours?

New York is like that, seeming to be at one moment a successful businesswoman going after deals, while at other times a deranged whore, slut, trollop, grabbing and stealing whatever she could get from you. I suppose that's why I liked it, the uncertainty of what can suddenly happen, a kiss on the lips or a stab in the back, same difference. In the end, a shrug and another day is stretching, yawning or else going back to sleep.

I noticed the lettered reflection of the window before me, even this high up it showed off what the window contained inside but at this angle, they were all mixed up, a reverse from what they actually spelled. I smiled, The 42nd Street Club, as if someone had forgotten the Jerking-Off part.

I smiled again and yawned. Yeah sure, but that's what I'm here for, jerking off!

***
Get it on Sizzler Editions

American Hipster

American Hipster

The Times Square Hustler

Who Inspired The Beat Movement

A Life of Herbert Huncke

Magnus Books

by Hilary Holladay

review by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

     There is a photograph of Herbert Huncke in New York’s 42nd Street, his eyes somewhat shut, a unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, his facial cheeks all puffed as if from pummeling he may received from another's fists or else simply just the hazards of falling down in the big city streets. The picture was taken by Allen Ginsberg in the 1940s, when Ginsberg was himself an unknown poet and straggling through Columbia University while hanging out with the seedy shapers of life in Times Square. It shows the drug addicted user-friend Huncke, who would eventually come to be known as the originator and drive behind the Beat movement of the 40s and the 50s, influencing such writers as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, along with Ginsburg who he knew first hand, even at times going to jail for Huncke’s crimes and compulsive shenanigans. These three would come to be known as the Fathers of the Beat Movement, while the originator, the real soul, Herbert Huncke was left behind in the dirt and debris of 42nd Street.

     This wonderfully written biography, American Hipster by Hilary Holladay beautifully and patiently examines Huncke’s life in the dregs of society, though I focus mainly on 42nd Street, but it does not pass judgment of whether that life was well worth it or not. After all, it was a chaotic time in America after the war, the complacent 1950s exploding into the experimental 1960s when drug use was very carefully prevalent and society was cast into turmoil with the Civil Rights movement, demands for Women’s Rights, Gay Rights coming out and all forcing their way to the top which had been repressed and held back for so long. Huncke himself was notoriously queer but Gay Rights wasn’t his bag yet he didn’t suddenly appear on the street scene, that scene, 42nd Street was always there, which the wasted drug addict Huncke was always trying for one more fix. But this time Huncke came upon the scene with a coterie of young potential writers just hanging on to every word that he uttered to them. What they were looking for was to be like just him, to be a beatnik, mouthing things like, “Cool, heavy, beat…” with Huncke nonchalantly muttering the words they were hungry for, “Cool daddio…” They must have been charmed and fascinated by the somewhat illiterate drug addict, with a new hip language and giving them a different look upon post-WW2 life in America, which had shown itself as nothing but boring complacency and middle class deadness. No wonder they went on the road looking for adventure and very quickly found it too.

    

     Much as the movie character Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy who gives a very good idea of what Huncke was like and could’ve been a direct mimeograph of his Times Square existence yet Huncke was no mere movie character/hustler he was for very real, so much that he would steal you blind and even take the clothes off your back while blinding you as you’re looking right at him. A low down thief is what he was.

     Much as I experienced the seediness of 42nd Street and Times Square in the 1960s and 70s, when the sexual revolution was upon it, I don’t know if I ever met or saw Herbert Huncke in those shady movie houses, every slimy Times Square denizen looking just like him, and there were lots of them around. Going into a sex movie in those years was going into a standing room only venue; every seat was taken by men hungry for motion picture sex and intently watching close-ups of vaginal muscles, the lubrication released by female flesh heightened by the erotic scent smelling to high heaven, or it least it did to me. I’d sit and watch as sooner or later someone would change seats in the auditorium. After a while, as I moved aside to let them pass, I realized my wallet was missing, had I dropped it unknowingly while being so aroused just staring at the flesh on the screen? Wait a minute, what about the disheveled guy who sat next to me, of course, who else but him, he ripped me off!

     Who knows if I ever came across Herbert Hunckey or not? Had no idea who he was at the time or would I care?

     The phantom of Hubert Huncke still slithers down the balcony stairs of ghostly 42nd Street movie houses… Just let the chimera go past. Wait a minute, why’s it stopping and slithering closer? Oh no, time to get out of here!

     Herbert Hunckey lived 1915 to 1996, pretty much stoned and wasted all through his years.

      

Mick Mykola Dementiuk is a two-time winner of the Lambda Award, and his collection, Times Square Queer, was a finalist for the 2012 Bisexual Book Award. He is also the author of Times Queer, about 42nd Street, and The 42nd Street Jerk-off Club which will be released shortly. Visit him at http://dementiuk.weebly.com or http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com

Contraband, a review

Contraband

Queer Mojo/Rebel Satori Press

By Charlie Vazquez

A New Literature?

Reviewed by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

     It’s the somewhat-near future and we are in the dark smoky world of Contraband, a novel by Charlie Vazquez, (and which has nothing to do with drugs) but which in a way reminds me of Louis Ferdinand Celine’s books Journey to the End of the Night or his Death on the Installment Plan, or perhaps even Franz Kafka’s The Castle or The Trial and others of that ilk where you can never know where you are, what you’re going to get or what’s the point of it anyway, since you just might as well puke your guts out. In much the same way the writings of Charlie Vazquez are an unclear, uncertain mystery, leaving a bad taste in your soul since it describes such an unknown world, one either in healing recovery or exposing its sores as it festers to its ugly conclusion but Vazquez surges on ahead determined to reach its end, no matter what that end might bring, total change or further boring rotting stagnation.

     It opens in Emerald City as Volfango is waiting for a train to take him back home after work. He is accosted by a dirty beggar, while other passengers complacently avoid looking at them but Volfango follows the beggar into a subway tunnel. Volfango is a government employee but has leanings to the other side, the rebel side. The beggar is a ‘lunar’, or “profane in the eyes of the Revolution” meaning he’s not one on them, as is also Volfango, but Volfango already has feelings of escaping underground, that’s why he goes after the beggar. The outside world is torn between those who follow orders and obey and those who able to survive and are hidden in the darkness.

    

     Eventually Volfango leaves the tunnel and goes to his mother’s house, the beggar has stolen his attaché case but he was the beggar’s long stick which gets him strange looks from the other riders. Two cops get on board but he shows them his government ID and instead they go after another sleeping beggar. In getting to his mother’s house he uses the walking stick defensively, ready to hit anyone who asks him what he’s doing. Outside, in the hills skirmishes break out between the rebels and government troops.

     Visits with his dentist, Doctora Valdez, for an aching toothache and has a tooth pulled in a dilapidated slum/doctor’s office with rats scurrying about the floor. The city is totally fallen apart, infected with dirt and rats everywhere. He has a brutal ugly tooth extraction as two big males nurses/aides hold him down; the Doctora pulls the bad tooth out.

     In the night he goes to a barroom where he knows he’ll meet someone who will help him to the underworld; he no longer wants to remain in the straight world. Volfango meets the young man Alto in the bar where the crowd is hugging and kissing when suddenly the government starts shooting on them. Volfango and Alto, with a few others run and get away. A host of different characters come on the scene, lasting for a few days then they are killed off by the government. It might have nothing to do with the future or is might have everything to do with it.

     He meets up with Teodoro, his half brother, and both fall into the hands of The Hidesman, a sort of a boss of the underworld, who holds Volfango chained to him. Volfango breaks away and kills The Hidesman. He signs to work on Lednov’s ship, which is headed to disembark at Sun City.

      In Sun City Teodoro talks and talks and it goes on for pages and pages. People come and people go. While in Sin City he is assigned by Don Carlos to do paperwork while Teodora takes care of the animals in the zoo. Sin City is the New Orleans, Vieux Carre, French Quarter, and for a time they work with the circus animals but the Republicans are getting closer, when at night in fears of them taking over, Don Carlos commits suicide. Later it was discovered he secretly was a woman under his manly disguise. The Republicans shoot at the brothers but they get away from Sun City making their way to a safer place, but still more dangerous in other ways, the Emerald City.

      If you’re under the impression that this might be about a new version of the Wizard of Oz, well, I have news for you, it isn’t, it’s a brutal horrible tale about surviving in a new land, a land with a town known as Emerald City but where the familiar will totally cease. In Emerald City a woman shoves a gruesome baby into Fandago’s arms and disappears. The baby is covered in disgusting smeared excrement but he holds on to it, though he desperately wants to throw up at every moment. Crawling through a tunnel it seems he’s crawling through an anus, a rectum, a disgusting orifice. He makes it back into Emerald City, a city waiting for him or is it?

     Contraband takes place in the future and it’s a prediction of what could be or what might be if we don’t watch it. If you like futuristic novels with the world having fallen apart or on the verge of collapse this one’s for you. Sort of like the films Blade Runner or Total Recall but with much more gruesome and uglier protagonists, as all wars usually tend to be ugly as sin.

     At first I had a hard time of reading Vazquez, even a few times setting it down and offering the book to another reader but I kept thinking and returning to it in the same way I once had difficulty with Celine. His two nauseous books, Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan only made me want to puke but I knew that Celine had certainly reached a higher level of literature than that which is consumed by today’s fickle childish readers. And I sensed that Vazquez reached the same point and had to be read, that is, pored over page by page. In this way I steeled my nauseous feelings and returned to the book, and I’m sure glad I did, for Vazquez is a new form of literature, a higher form of writing, one that is despicably disgusting but still it has to be read and savored, as uncomfortable it might make you. An excellent story and a great job, Charlie Vazquez, I’m hungry to read still more of your future work!

Mick Mykola Dementiuk is a two-time winner of the Lambda Award, and his collection, Times Square Queer, was a finalist for the 2012 Bisexual Book Award. Visit him at http://dementiuk.weebly.com or http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com

King of Angels review

King of Angels

Bethue Press

by Perry Brass

reviewed by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

A Saintly Who Done It

     A Jewish boy, Benjamin ‘Benjy” Rothberg is growing up in Savannah, Georgia with his father Robby/Leon, and his non-Jewish Episcopalian mother Caroline, who sits around drinking too many gin and grapefruit Salty Dogs with her girlfriends. Robby/Leon is a salesman and works mostly out of town, while Caroline stays taking care of the house with a black maid on the side, such as women used to do in those years.  Every time Caroline drives over to pick Benjy up from school the car radio is always blasting some Beatles song on the car radio as she happily sings along. She loves the music of the era, makes her feel young and alive, Benjy is always embarrassed. The time is the early 1960s and JFK is president just before he was assassinated. In the novel Benjy is starting to learn about life and eventually his homosexuality. What can a thirteen growing boy do but get a little ass, that is, suck a little cock and have his own sucked off, too?

     Learn to be a man, as his father Robby stresses, so Benjy is sent to a Catholic school where he befriends Tim, an Irish lad who comes from a large boisterous family and Arthur, a good looking Puerto Rican boy from a very poor family with a drunken father who takes it out on his son, Arthur. There are many other boisterous dangerous boys in the school but it seems that Benjy is pulled to these two. He follows Arthur sneakily home one evening and gets lost, wandering into a bar (at the time ‘gay’ bars were still unheard of) with shady characters sitting around and drinking cheap beer. One drinker smiles lasciviously at Benjy but does take the time to show him where Arthur is staying; a poor worthless Puerto Rican dump and Benjy is very embarrassed but goes go in after his friend. In surprise Arthur is stunned to see his classmate but the Puerto Rican boy’s father comes in and asks crude questions of the visitor.

      Still, Benjy has to undergo a bar mitzvah according to Jewish tradition and he asks Father Alexis, one of his teachers to guide him since the priest had taken courses in Judaism, and in surprise Father Alexis agrees to teach him. When suddenly on the last day at the retreat he went to the beautiful Puerto Rican boy Arthur is missing. The police find his body drowned in the lake when suddenly Benjy also learns that his father is being accused by his employer of embezzlement. Faced with two disasters at one time, Benjy is devastated, plus a few other boys are suspected by the police in having a hand in Arthur’s demise. It all comes boiling down to a fitting satisfying conclusion. A beautiful Southern drama and one of little boys intermixed with the depravity of the time, the bustling confusing era of change with growing older parents and superiors. One night Benjy returns to Father Alexis for more bar mitzvah training but he smells alcohol on Father Alexis’ breath, he doesn’t feel odd when the priest kisses the top of his head yet he still is forced to leave, a bit confused. Why did the priest kiss him Benjy wants to know, was that part of some ritual but he does suspect the priest was after something more and it wasn’t Benjy’s friendship.

      The cops close the case of dead boy Arthur since there is nothing there but Benjy is determined to find out for himself about what really happened by putting a stake-out at a little used library bathroom that he’s certain the slayer will be visiting again. Meanwhile, he makes it with Nathan, an older boy at the age of seventeen who takes him to a ‘gay’ club but who tells him to stick with the Catholic boys instead of perverts like him. Benjy is amazed that such ‘gay clubs’ exist in the 1960s, still his hard throbbing penis makes him feel otherwise.

     Indeed this wonderful satisfying novel is nicely written and easy going, even with the inner confusion and accusation which will comes later. At first I thought it would be heavy duty and philosophical, what with the sub-title, A Novel About the Genesis of Identity and Belief, but no, it was written about our hero Benjy, a young man, in a style which is reminiscent of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March or Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, two books about young men growing up and looking out at an evil, benign world glaring and sneering back at them. The other great thing about the book is that the boys are masturbating and ejaculating at the proper age of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen unlike the fictional characters in other books by some publishers who will only bring out a book or e-book when the main character is portrayed in their pages as sexually confident at the rightful adult age of eighteen or some such. What rot and rubbish! Thirteen is the perfect age of self discovery and anything older is an evident publisher’s fear and bullshit. ‘I orgasmed at the age of eighteen’ is a lie. I know of some men who have experienced ejaculation at the age of eight, nine, ten, and who’s to say at what age it can’t be for real.

     More honest books like this by authors such as the bold Perry Brass and we can send these timid scared publishers where they belong, into the rubbish heap. Great job Perry Brass, you and your publisher Bethue Press deserve high praise for your courage and daring in bringing out this very real-life novel, King of Angels. You are royalty itself, bravo!

Mick (Mykola) Dementiuk is a two-time winner of the Lambda Award, and his collection, Times Square Queer, was a finalist for the 2012 Bisexual Book Award. Visit him at http://dementiuk.weebly.com or http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com

My Life with Blondie

My Life with Blondie

Cervena Barva Press

by Jiri Klobouk

reviewed by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

     Hey, drop everything Blondie is coming to town! That’s how Jiri Klobouk, author of My Date with Blondie, begins his comic/tragic novel about Harley Davidson, who has a thirty-three year love-infatuation with Blondie, singer/movie star and lover of his dreams, or so he thinks. Even though they’ve never met Harley now has the chance to finally come face to face with his idol, and he imagines settling down with her for the rest of their lives. But does Harley really stand a chance? And how much of this fantasy is real?

     Harley Davidson, yes, that’s his name, is a man in his fifties who has had this infatuation since his teens. Since his early days in Vienna when he first saw her picture in a movie magazine, holding onto the memory through war torn Vietnam, on to Germany where he got married (for the second time), into Portugal where Blondie lived her young years, and now eking out his life but always with the dream and vision of Blondie. Oh boy is he eager and ready for her! Even Harley’s current long time girlfriend Amanda, so he tells us, is just as eager to meet her. Still, Harley claims Amanda is upset because she lost her kitten Tiger and not because Blondie is so close nearby. Well, maybe…

     Harley is able to get his old job back at the Royal Arms Hotel, which he calls an old four story flop house but which Blondie is sure to visit, and in between Harley is faced with the daily problems of working in the hotel with his supervisors and fellow employees, who seem to have stepped out of a loony bin.

      McCarthy, owner of the hotel, comes back from Brazil and has the handyman Melvin, who cares for the hotel, build a Brazilian rain forest in the owner’s fourth floor room. Besides the gay hotel person Jacques and the chambermaid Ella the entire staff is there. And how they run the hotel, what a farce!

    Going back in time Harley was eighteen in Vienna when he got married to Ilona, an older girl whose parents had been tortured and killed by the Hungarians. Harley doesn’t care for her since he already is dreaming and waiting to meet Blondie, who he is certain he will get married to but instead he agrees with her offer of a proposal. They get married, or as another character says, Harley has a screw loose from the Vietnam War. And an old war buddy also asks, “(I)t could be a sign of some kind of mental disorder. Have you ever thought about that?”

     Harley was conceived on a Harley Davidson motorcycle as his parents went tearing around Europe at the time when the Jews were being butchered by the Nazis. And Harley finds out from an old librarian his parents were bank robbers desperate to get away from the Nazis. Harley’s life is just as messed up and confused as is the stigma he lives under, being in love with that vague chimera he has never met, Blondie.

     Still, he gets married to Ilona but after five years he separates from her and marries Helga in Frankfurt, Germany, a singer who is also a little nymphet escorted by her Canadian parents. But after they have a kid Harley leaves her but she quickly gets married to another man.

     For years Harley and his now-girlfriend Amanda have been seeing a psychiatrist, and Harley has high hopes for some kind of cure, but after falling in ‘love’ with Amanda it’s clear that she is as whacky as he is, apparently a bit of a nutcase, as one character says about him. Still they make a perfect couple except that he’s in love with the mystical Blondie, his stigma from the past.

     This is a sad/funny, moving novel. You can’t help but think about the guys you see wandering around town, living out their lives in menial jobs, with menial relationships, that is if they have any, and just existing from day to day. Well, I suppose they do have someone to love, for better or for worse. But where is their Blondie? Is she the one that away? I hope Harley finds her in his lunacy, and with a little something thrown in just to make life a tiny bit interesting, much like in the spit and vomit of this beautiful, fantastic happy novel. Hip hip hooray! Here’s to Harley, dream on!

http://dementiuk.weebly.com -various e-books

http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com

Lambda Literary Awards Winner 2013/Gay Erotica, 2009/Bisexual Fiction

Pleasure Trout

Pleasure Trout

by Gloria Mindak/Mindock

review by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

    When I approached this chapbook it was with a sense of trepidation after all it reminded me I had once taken a poetry class in college, Introduction to Poetry, reading the sonnets of Shakespeare, the verses of John Donne and the poetics of T.S. Eliot, and came out of it with a feeble grade of C for my efforts. I knew I would never try that again, I could never make any sense out of poetry. I shook my head and went on with my life. But over the years I did look into the words of Allen Ginsburg or the drunken works of Charles Bukowski, finding some comfort and solace therein, because they “spoke” to me unlike the others who “poetized” and never made any sense.

      So when I found out the Gloria Mindock had a new book coming out, “Pleasure Trout” I smiled and knew I was going to order it. Gloria is the founder/editor of Cervena Barva Press but I know of her from her bookstore The Lost Bookshelf, which carries a few copies of my Lambda Award winning novel “Holy Communion” amongst others in its racks. I eagerly opened her book, reading page by page, and becoming bemused, befuddled and totally lost. What the hell? Then I again read her introduction where she says, “Don’t try to understand what is written here. Just enjoy the nonsense.” Well, of course, if I had heard this thirty years ago my poetry class would come out different, it wouldn’t seem that bad at all. I laughed, because I love the language that poetry uses, the rhyme, the meter, the words, which I use daily anyway.

This baby is heaven and

this baby is something

you ain’t got

If Mindock used exclamation points her last sentence would demand it, I’m sure. That’s what I love, nonsensical poetry.

One day you feel dull

and uncharming

You are lying

Actually you are largely

undeveloped

cooked up out of

fiction

If you could write, you

would be absent on noise

Or,

My arms are a huge

stall to entangle

your pedal, your feet

If I get rough, I can

diagnose your pulsing

solitude

    

     Once you begin to stop looking for meanings, in its absence, a meaning will surely come. Just shut up and listen, I think.

Ok, so this is only a

thought, a tale, a struggle

not to cease

Hey, we have all out lives

     Thanks Gloria, who woulda thunk it, poetry appreciation this late in the game, you made a new poetry convert, that’s for sure! Love your book. 

 Mick Mykola Dementiuk
http://dementiuk.weebly.com 
http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com
Lambda Literary Awards Winner 2013/Gay Erotica, 2009/Bisexual Fiction

Sissy Godiva

My newest one, Sissy Godiva, to be out from JMS Books in a month or so. Hmm, I wonder what's that about?

Lola Dances

Lola Dances

By Victor Banis

reviewed by Mykola Mick Dementiuk

     There have been books which over the years have become very dear to me, to be read over and over, and always coming upon something new in them. Authors such as Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Victor Hugo, I.B. Singer and Henry Miller, just to mention a few, have been able to hold me for days, weeks, months so I could read them and over and over again. Titles such as Brothers Karamazov, Grapes of Wrath, Les Miserables, Family Moskat, Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn etc., have held me repeatedly in my quest and rediscovery of some item I must have already read. In the reading of a book it’s inevitable you will overlook some paragraphs or passages which you will be aware of the next time around, mumbling to yourself, “Aw damn, now how did I miss that?” Books are like close friends we have known over the years, we tend to skim through and overlook them at times.

     

    Lola Dances by Victor Banis is one such book, I’ve read it maybe five times and, of course, each time found in it something new. Another reader might grimace and mutter, “So you’re not as well read as you think…” Well, yes, I know that, or as Henry Miller in The Books In My Life asks, “Who is?”

    

    In Lola Dances we meet Terry Murphy running away through New York’s Lower East Side streets from the bullies after him. “Sissy!” they shout. 18 year old Terry, living alone but having an elder brother, Brian, had been on his way to dancing lessons before he had gotten so rudely interrupted by the bullies. Still, dancing lessons in New York’s 1880s were very expensive, but somehow Terry comes up with the tuition for the dance classes. In his flight from the bullies he meets up with Tom Finnegan who takes him down alleys which the bullies know little of and Tom shows him a few new things, like himself being soft, tender and caring, which they both know very little about. Terry likes Tom a lot, as Tom does him, whereby they both confusedly blush.

      

     But Terry’s brother Brian, wants to leave New York and head out West, where he can get rich fast, this eventually finds them in Alder Gulch, Utah, a mining community with loads of miners digging for wealth but very few showing any sure results. By that time in the story, the two brothers have gotten physically close to each other and nightly Brian would bugger Terry as he just lay there. Brian uses that as an excuse for his brother’s homosexual lusts, saying to himself that he’s doing it to keep that fruit Terry in line and at bay from the other horny miners. Still, Terry enjoys these trysts with his brother and even thinks of himself as a woman. He recalls Tom Finnegan back in New York as the red-headed boy peed, “with his fly hanging open…a glimpse of its bush at its base, like spun gold, gleaming in the dawns yellow light.” (p68) Every time he closes his eyes he imagines Tom as being there.

    

     Alas, happy dreams in life hardly ever exist; still there were other handsome men at the camp. For one Joshua Simmons was there, who Terry gives his first blowjob to but Joshua is in shock from what Terry just did and runs away. Sad tearful Terry awaits his return but it wasn’t meant to be.

      

     Terry tries for a job at the Lucky Dollar when their star singer leaves for San Francisco, leaving behind her dresses and gowns. Belle Blessing recognizes Terry’s femininity, Terry gets the job.

      

    “Something happened that had never happened before at The Lucky Dollar. The room went silent, a thunderous silence. No one spoke. Even the slap, slap, slap of the cards at the poker table went still. A hundred mouths hung open, a hundred pair of eyes were suddenly riveted on the little figure standing before them. Like a rose, suddenly appearing in the filth of that dirty room.” (p89)  Lola Valdez comes to life.

      

     Now Terry/Lola refuses Brian’s demands for ass fucking, having becoming a real liberated woman by saying “No!” Certainly, way before her time, that’s for sure.

      

     But that night, Brian gets his revenge on Terry by taking the money that Terry had saved up and leaves for Butte, Montana, taking a confused Joshua with him, still at a loss in trying to understand what Terry’s blowjob really meant.

      

     Lola continues working/singing at The Lucky Dollar until a somewhat neighbor she knows from town, Reverend Davidson, sees her changing from Lola’s clothes back into Terry’s. Of course he wants a blowjob from Terry and comes at her/him. Terry fires her Derringer and stops him cold.

      

     Five years go by and after traveling and singing in the camps, “the rose of the mining camps” she was known, is now living and singing at the Barbary Coast in San Francisco.  One night she recognizes Tom Finnegan from New York who has become a gambler, club owner, but who is stunned at seeing her, becoming a total confused mess. It also threw me, until I read the passages a few times over the years and finally did understand what was occurring… I’ll leave that to the reader to find out for himself what was occurring but it certainly brought the novel into better focus and I look forward to reading it many times again. Sometimes life wants you to accept what is, don’t you think?  

      

     And Victor Banis certainly knows how to write a good, thoughtful and worthy novel, after all, this classic has been pored over many a time by this reader and will be with me for many more years to come. And I know that many readers have done the same. Lola Dances is simply exquisite!

      

     There she goes, watch her dance…. Ooh la la!

****

The Bookstore Clerk

My newest one, The Bookstore Clerk, from JMS Books, will be out very shortly. About the days when I worked in Doubleday, Scribner's, Brentano's bookstores on NY's 5th Avenue and a few down in Greenwich Village. Boy, those were my reading days, and I sure read a lot, besides other things, too ;)

Always Looking

My newest one, Always Looking, from JMS Books.

"I started going out early with girls and guys, not for sex because at that age, who the hell knew what sex was?"

With those words, Danny's coming-of-age begins. From the gloomy, stifling hallways of high school in the 1960's to the vast expanse of 1970's New York, young Danny explores the complexities of love and lust in the arms of Luba, a girl he believes himself in love with, and then in the company of various men, from whom he learns his true nature.

Raised by a poor, single mother whose upcoming marriage to a second husband threatens Danny's shaky world, Danny finds that accepting -- and ultimately embracing -- the unpredictability and promise of his future means letting go of the past and taking the leap of faith he knows he needs in his journey to maturity.

JMS Books