See my other web page: Mykola Dementiuk: Holy Communion, a Novel by Mykola Dementiuk

 More info, stories etc under Mykola Dementiuk: The Christmas Whore

Vovochka, The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant

Vovochka, The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant

by Alexander J. Motyl

Anaphora Literary Press, Augusta, Georgia 2015

Reviewed by Mykola Mick Dementiuk


     There is a curious scene in the dim humorous novel Vovochka when the two lead characters, both named Putin and both called Vovochka, are in Communist-controlled East Berlin and decide to hop over the Wall and partake of the heady pleasures of West Berlin.

     To a typical Alexander Motyl reader this may be chuckled at and passed over as a typical playful Motyl-jokesterism but to this reader, walljumping was a dire and deadly risk that East German young men partook of very often, as documented by Peter Schneider in his book The Wall Jumper, published in 1982, seven years before the Fall of the Wall but which as a political science professor Motyl would certainly be aware of. They’d daringly get over the Wall, drink and drug and party, then cross back over and resume their dull, boring lives.

     Hard to fathom this but with a young Putin Vovochka and his buddy, another Vovochka, these daring walljumping events became common place and clearly in their world-view certainly obvious. Their boldness and risk daring sets them apart and in good stead of each other as they grow and function in Berlin, Leningrad, Moscow burrowing their way through the quagmire that is the Soviet government and into the secret service, the KGB.

     But in a world which is rapidly and constantly changing, and with the troubled appearance of an old and senile Brezhnev, a drunken Yeltsin, and an inept Gorbachev, the stage is set for young Vovochka to play his part.

     Motyl shows us Vovochka as an egomaniac ruler of Russia, slowly and horribly taking back the Russian empire which was his under the Tsars and the Communist rulers, but lost and rapidly disappearing in the past decade or so, is getting back to where it was destined to be, under Vovochka’s strict control.

     The first part of the book is humorous, playful as the two Vovochka’s come out, but in the second part the funny cheer becomes humorless, stern and regimented as Vovochka holds his power and strengthens it in every direction. Thus once again becoming what he was destined to be, the supreme ruler of Russia, Tsar Vovochka. If you want to know what Russian history could be or is becoming, I highly recommend this book.

Alexander J. Motyl (b. 1953, NYC) is a writer, painter, and professor. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008 and 2013, he is the author of six novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, My Orchidia, and The Taste of Snow, Fall River. He has done performances of his fiction and poetry at the Cornelia Street Café and the Bowery Poetry Club. Motyl’s artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows in NYC, Philadelphia, and Toronto and is on display on the Internet gallery, www.artsicle.com. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in NYC.

Reviewed by Mykola Mick Dementiuk

The Berlin Wall, 25 years ago

The Berlin Wall, 25 years ago

25 years ago, November 1989, I was traveling about in Europe when suddenly the whole scene exploded into cheers and jubilation, the Berlin Wall had come down... What do they say about all the King's horses and all the King's men?

I had just spent a grueling three years on my first novel, Holy Communion, which did come to win the Lambda Award and a nice Christmas break in Europe would be ideal. I was planning to go to the land of my teachers, Strindberg, Ibsen, Knut Hamsen, but in Malmo, Sweden the news was constant, something was happening in Eastern Europe. I took the train to Copenhagen and another to West Berlin, it was November 9, 1989...

These are a few photos of the event I saw during that historic week (a few were shown a week earlier).

Mykola Dementiuk-web page
dementiuk-various e-books
Books and E-books under Amazon 

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

Fall River

Fall River

by Alexander Motyl

published by Alternative Books Press

reviewed by Mykola Mick Dementiuk


In trying to probe into and remember the past, Alexander Motyl, author of Fall River, gives us a new meaning and resonance to the characters who lived so long ago, the 1920s, the 30s and the 40s, lived, worked, suffered and were erased by History.

There is a faint memory, a theme permeating the entire novel, echoing at certain points but uncertain of what the reality actually is. “ Smo’getsinyorize,” is constantly being repeated over and over by some characters until a Soviet overlord puts a bullet between the eyes, after much torture and castration,  and brings the entire charade to an end. The melody is “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and seems to be one of the memories carried by the three main characters, Mike, Manya and Stefa, all brother and sisters at certain points of their lives, as they travel back and forth from nation to nation as if confused where to settle and live, Fall River, New York City or in Poland/Ukraine.

It starts off with Mike in a new country, learning the new tricks and the language of America and hitting up on every woman he comes upon, Edna, Wanda, or who? Poor Mike, what pain and suffering he brings upon himself.... Between Manya and Stefya, his sisters, they too are confused by the new country but they must work and raise families in the new homeland. But, of course, their father drags them back to Polish Ukraine after their mother’s death, only to live with the German Nazis coming into power in the late 1930s, early 40s.

Motyl paints a beautiful picture of the confused characters as they struggle to survive in a blustering country at a time when chaos seemed the order of the day. Being Ukrainian myself, I fully understand how almost impossible it may be to track down and isolate the scant moment of that past...

And Motyl does an excellent job in recreating the tenements, the moods, the feeling that was not only Polish Ukraine but the entire Ukrainian Lower East Side. Again, you could get lost and disappear in it. An excellent job, New York City and the Ukrainian Lower East Side lives again!


Alexander J. Motyl (b. 1953, NYC) is a writer, painter, and professor. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008 and 2013, he is the author of six novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, My Orchidia, and The Taste of Snow. He has done performances of his fiction and poetry at the Cornelia Street Café and the Bowery Poetry Club. Motyl’s artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows in NYC, Philadelphia, and Toronto and is on display on the Internet gallery, www.artsicle.com. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in NYC.

Amazon

http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com
 Lambda Literary Awards Winner 2013/Gay Erotica, 2009/Bisexual Fiction

Baby Doll

Baby Doll

by Mykola Dementiuk
edited by Sally Miller

Mykola Dementiuk has again brought us an unusual story of a youth growing up in New York City. Skipping school as a daily routine, the main character of Baby Doll finds himself spending time at the East River Park, looking for girls. Instead he finds a pair of pink underwear which take him on an adventure that shapes his future.

Baby Doll gives us a literary look at the complicated psychodynamics of love and sex between a boy and a man in America in the early ’80s (the beginning era of AIDS, sex-offender witch-hunts, and gay/transvestite visibility). Like a good movie, Baby Doll is definitely worth giving a second (or third) read. Mykola’s mastery at storytelling and excellent writing will keep you engaged the first time through, but subsequent readings will help you understand the complex forces that unfold between the characters. You may question his opinions on femininity and relationships, but you won’t be able to ignore Mykola’s love for words as well as his understanding of a boy’s feelings and behavior.

One of the best things I'd written, still gets me hard...

read more: Baby Doll

Tenement Tales of New York

Tenement Tales of New York

James William Sullivan

reviewed by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

    “Pat Murphy, boy of eight years, whose clothes were dirty, whose hair was tousled, face smudged, and hands blackened…” Thus begins Tenement Tales of New York, an out-of-print book, published in 1895, and whom we have to thank Ephemeral New York for bringing it to our attention.

     I enjoyed reading this book of tales; it brought old New York to my touch and grasp. Such as Slob Murphy, the rowdy boy of New York streets in the late 1880-90s, who injures his hand and is at death’s door as a result. He has remorse for all the street fighting and shenanigans he’s done over his short years and seeing a vision of his dead mother, says the Lord’s Prayer and passes away.  A bit maudlin but I suppose that fits in with the time. His friends and acquaintances sadly look upon his passing, till someone says, " Wot's dey a-goin to do wit' his old cloze ? " Each hungry for getting something or other to take care of them; a shrug at the dead boy. Meanwhile his father, who is angry, but dares any police office to get at his son’s dead body. He speaks with a typical Irish accent, reminiscent of Charles Dickens characters, declaiming, avowing, and swearing. In a way, it sounds like a pleasant blarney which we no longer hear in these parts. (Oh, how New York has changed…) We follow the funeral procession to a solemn burial and what else? his father ends up dead drunk, and life in New York goes on…

     In another tale, Minnie Kelsey’s Wedding, a girl sits in a tenement all bundled up from the chill and looking out a window. “(D)oors slamming, children wailing, women scolding, boys hallooing, all mingling with the endless clatter of kitchen labors.” She had arrived in the city expecting a very different life but very quickly was trapped in its poverty and go-nowhere existence, nothing but a factory girl working day after day at the same tedious labor. Still, she has friends who invite her to attend a ball, and though she isn’t sure of going she says yes. At the ball she sees the man of her dreams. At first she intimidated when she hears other gossiping about his fiery nature and that he has a different girl every weekend. But alone with her the two-timing man proposes… A schmaltzy story, still with the rest of the tales in the book it fits right in.

     Cohen’s Figure is about a sewing machine operator, a boring lackluster job, but which has been done for countless year after year, while Luigi Barbieri concerns a new Italian merchant at Mott Street fruit emporium, who arranges every fruit on his stand but still can’t get any customers, just a few. “If he could but learn to speak fluently to the Americans, like his padrone, he might some day become a man of influence himself. He might even aspire to an East Side grocery store, with a stock of Italian goods.” He helps a little girl from getting run over by a truck and he himself is struck down. The only tears someone sheds is the vague obituary "I wonder what killed off the last one — laziness or bad whisky?"

      Leather’s Banishment is about a boy pick-pocketing a woman on the subway and disappearing with her screaming behind him; he’s done this countless times and will do it again. In Not Yet dreamer Ivan, whose always dreaming of ‘castles in Spain’ reads the paper and takes the subway each morning to work, where he labors before his sewing machine and reads reports from Russia and Germany.  At work it’s payday and suddenly he feels cheated, being fined for a ruined jacket collar which did didn’t do. Is outraged by the injustice but what can he do? He sinks back into his socialist dreams of the future where the world is all right and fair. Instead “…from the open doorways of the tenements, and falling into the broken lines of passers- by hurrying along on the sidewalks, were poor-looking work-people,— men, women, children.”

    While in A Young Desperado a rich 7 year old boy accidentally wanders into the poor neighborhood where the poor kids attack him. He meets other boys; one takes him around the city, on buses and cars and tells him that he eats about once a week. Teaches him the way of the streets...

     These different tales about immigrant life in New York City in the 1890s show that the city is always throbbing and booming, and always one step ahead of everybody. In many of the stories we get glimpses of what it was like among the poor folk. What this book does is bring the street life into clear focus and vision, the different crowds, the traffic on the street, the rubbish, the debris and the countless other little things which were a part of living in New York, uptown, downtown, the poor are everywhere, East Side, West Side, all around the town…so to speak. Still, I enjoyed it very much; captures the mood of New York and how it was so very long ago. As it is drastically changing now it has been constantly changing on and on…  

An aside: Though I very much liked reading this there is a more recent book about New York in the early 1900s The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker A book that will certainly set your old New York imagination spinning. A grand book!

Ephemeral New York
http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com

Raiding The Sanctuary

Raiding the Sanctuary

Redcatchers in Cambodia, May 12th-June 25th, 1970

by Robert J. Gouge

reviewed by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

     In thinking of writing this review I quickly realized how little I know about one of the main characters Ihor Dopiwka, whose jangled voice, one of many, echoes throughout its pages. I knew Ihor back in grade school for maybe seven, eight years, fifty years ago, when afterwards we quickly lost contact with each other and went our separate ways. Adulthood was upon us, holding a job, getting a girlfriend, playing out our adult responsibilities, like being married, raising kids, or else going off to war. Ihor went to war and fought; I stayed home and demonstrated against it. Two paths were taken, two opposite lives were being lived.

      This book is about one segment of the Vietnam War, America’s secret invasion of Cambodia May-June 1970, but to me the book is about one soldier in its ranks, Ihor Dopiwka, E/5-12, of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, a young man with whom I went to grade school. Ihor found me on the Internet and I instantly responded. It’s a miracle he didn’t get killed, as so many with him did in battle, but who had something I didn’t have: the courage to leave his home behind and go off to fight a war.

     Because the closest I ever came to the Vietnam War (1961-73) was in going to see the movie Apocalypse Now (1979) in my usual drunken state. Man, was that film totally weird but in a way was awesomely great! I saw it a few times afterwards, trailing the complicated story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) as he followed the trail through Vietnam and Cambodia, going after the elusive American renegade/officer Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who even the American military wanted dead. This almost existential portrayal of the characters had me imagining Vietnam couldn’t be such bad place to be in, deadly and dangerous for certain, but morbidly seductive. Now who wouldn’t want to be in a Saigon hotel room drinking and fighting your own demons as Willard was doing in the beginning of the film? What valor, what pride, what bravado! Buaoh! (Throwing up…) Shaking my head, I think, “What drunken idiocy…”

     I spent most of the Vietnam War years drunk and inebriated, having successfully beaten the draft and once in a while going to an anti-war demonstration while trying to pick up a cute demonstrating girl. But to little or no avail. No War meant the same as No Pussy. I did see Ihor at one time as I marched on Fifth Avenue screaming/chanting at the blasé crowds sneering at us. Ihor stood looking at me, shaking his head, “Nicky, Nicky…” he muttered (using my childhood name); I instantly recognized him but just lowered my head, trying to disappear in the protesting crowd.

     The years went by; I graduated from college, cleaned my act up and struggled at becoming a writer. Yet being a writer was a snap, but still no publisher cared with what I had written, the manuscripts simply kept going out and just as easily they were returned. Time passed, new wars started, new demonstrations began same as it ever was. It didn’t matter whether I was old or young the angry world did what it wanted to do. Eventually, I did make a tiny headway into the publishing world and won the Lambda Award/Bisexual Fiction for my novel Holy Communion, which was about a young boy going through his religious ceremony at the innocent age of seven, an age when Ihor and I would’ve been, when we were just still obedient classmates.

     Ihor and I spent one summer together marauding on his street, 9th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, playing tag, hide ‘n seek, stickball, if we could manage that since they were digging up his street for pipes changes. After the workers were gone in the evening, the mass of holes on the street must have looked like the foxholes of Ihor’s inquisitive imagination, a reality of his foreboding future, a reality that was now quickly approaching. On the street with Ihor lived other classmates, Bohdan, Zenon, Jaroslaw, and many others. We lived in a neighborhood which was crowded with other Ukrainians, 6th Street, 7th Street (where our church and school were), 8th Street, 9th Street, that if you went up or down a block someone would be there who knew you simply by your nationality; I myself lived with my parents on 13th Street, we weren’t that much far away from the Ukrainian community, still sort of living on the edge, you might say. Still, I played with Ihor and his buddies most every chance I got.

    But the years came and went and we shuffled in different directions, other high schools, other girlfriends, other interests and goals. This was the late 1960s and a new explosive world was beckoning, calling to us from different directions. Hair was getting longer, skirts were rising higher and higher, and Love was everywhere in the air.

     Since the draft was close upon him I suppose Ihor joined the military, as I’m sure many of the boys in the neighborhood were doing. I myself had drifted to California, joining the new Haight-Ashbury Hippies movement. Ihor went through boot camp and found himself with other new soldiers “in the hellhole of the world” (as it was called in Apocalypse Now), the country of Vietnam, with constant helicopters going chuck a chuck a chuck a chuck… 

“(With) a unique mixture of whites, blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics, the average age of the combat infantryman in Charlie (Company) was 20.5 years old. Nearly all had graduated from high school and a substantial number of them had earned college credit or had attended trade-schools before being drafted. Several of the “older” men were four-year college graduates.”

     Really, no different from the rest of American young society…

     Ihor’s service with the Redcatchers was as a sniper, hiding in the bush and firing at an unsuspecting Viet Cong, while still going through the turmoil of the rest of his men, waging in a constant battle they were under.

     This book Raiding The Sanctuary, is dated as May12th-June 25th, 1970 when they killed scores of enemy soldiers but themselves lost countless close friends and comrades.   

     I don’t know if Ihor continued serving with the Army afterwards or whether he himself was wounded in battle. All I can say after so many, many years, “It’s great that my friend, Ihor Dopiwka, is still alive!”

     Bravo!

***

 http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com

Tollbooth by Bud Smith

    

Tollbooth

Piscataway House Publications

by Bud Smith

reviewed by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

     A manic, uproarious novel very reminiscent of the drunken novels of Charles Bukowski but Bud Smith takes his character’s mania a little farther and more deeper than Bukowski ever could. In Smith the mania is seductive, teasing, after all who would not want to lead the boring repetitive hum drum existence the toll collector leads? No wonder he gives in to his depraved madness, I surely would.

     The toll collector lives his rather dull life, taking tolls on a New Jersey highway, mumbling to himself hour after hour with his wife (in his fantasies), the few friends he has accumulated over the years and most of all the seductive teenage girls he knew once upon a time or happens to know right now. Needless to say the reader can’t help but look at these girls and ask are if they fantasies, these future hookers which he drools over anyway, big-breasted, high-haired, tight-pants and very short-skirted, a jerk-off dream come true right before his eyes? Perhaps, but still this reader was sucked in by the euphoria of that life, following the tale as it shifted far beyond New Jersey. The madness held me on every page; I very much wanted to know where he eventually was going.

     I thoroughly enjoyed Tollbooth, even the 300 or so pages seemed too short for the depravity displayed, I certainly would have read a few hundred more. A beautiful book, Bud Smith, with the Tollbooth you have collected your final toll and no more are you forced to mindlessly mutter, “Pay your toll!” No, let the miserable future collectors repeat it for you. Bravo, a great novel!  

Available in Kindle but I would get it in paperback, it's something you would want to hold and cherish over the years  

 http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com

Two Lambda Awards

Lambda Awards for Holy Communion Bisexual Fiction 2009 and The Facialist Gay Erotica 2012 (press picture to get full photo)

Sweet Snow

Sweet Snow

by Alexander J. Motyl

reviewed by Mykola Dementiuk

Much as Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago Alexander J. Motyl looks upon Soviet prisoners in his novel Sweet Snow but these prisoners are very different, since the year is 1933 and the worst enforced state famine, the Holodomer is tearing through the Ukraine while Stalin sits and smiles, smokes his cigarette and does absolutely nothing.

Four prisoners are being transported to the prison camps, a Jewish Communist from New York City, a German nobleman from Berlin, a Polish diplomat from Lwow, and Ukrainian nationalist from Vienna. But their Russian guards are notorious vodka drinkers who crash and overturn their transport truck until the guards are dead or dying, freeing the prisoners from their captives. And oh, what a freedom it is! The frozen wasteland of Siberia lies before them, an emptiness every which way they turn. Still scarred and shaken from the accident they start trudging their way back, whichever way that might be.

The description of the four surviving prisoners is grueling, even a few times this reader squirmed in revulsion from was being portrayed, lost men trying to make in back into life, if such a thing still exists.

Along their way they do come upon people, dead children holding on presumably their dead mothers, all emaciated, their bellies distended and dead of slow starvation. This is not a book for the careless, fickle reader but one who dares to look upon and learn what really went on at the time, mass organized starvation by the powers that be, the 1933 Soviet Elites.

I've read many of Motyl's books, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian and others, but never before did I read one such as this, Sweet Snow, showing him at his masterful powers as a writer.

Well done, Alexander Motyl, literary greatness is certainly yours!

Alexander Motyl is a writer, painter, and professor. He is the author of five novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, and The Taste of Snow (forthcoming); his poems have appeared in Mayday, Counterexample Poetics, Istanbul Literary Review, Orion Headless, The Battered Suitcase, Red River Review, and New York Quarterly; his art­work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto and is on view at www.artsicle.com. Motyl teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York.

See review for Motyl's Flippancy click here

  order My Orchidia here

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