Good Samaritans Finish Last

I'm proud to say Mickey Spillane was a friend of mine. I met him many years ago. Now he has passed. I knew him very well, enough to call him Mick, and now I feel his absence as if it is a deep void in my world.

As a young teen, I'd read many of Spillane's paperbacks. I found them jammed into my Uncle's paperback bookcase. My Uncle couldn't afford hard-bound books and the height of the bookcase shelves would not accept a taller volume. I became a prodigious reader of Spillane's works, lured in by the garish book covers--sexy pulp. The content was always a fun-fast read that awakened your imagination if not other body parts. I was a fan.

When I was a college student attending NYU, I signed up for an evening class. Afterward, I'd subway uptown to the Westside, 42nd Street Metro/Bus terminal. I'd walk the short blocks uptown to the corner of 49th and 9th Avenue, to Spillane's Bar.

(New York City is a grid. Short blocks 'Streets' go up or downtown. Long blocks 'Avenues' are three times the length and run across town from the Hudson River on the Westside to the East River on the East.)

Spillane's was an old bar. If you looked up at the painted ceiling of stamped metal squares, through the dust, you'd see the paint, a bad afterthought, peeling from the copper. Why some idiot painted the tiles, we never knew. Every here and there the rusty copper color shone as though the ceiling was hiding gold. The bar smelled of stale beer and the aroma of a day-old coffee pot. A wet mop in a bucket in the corner didn't help the aroma, but once inside, to a young man, it was a glorious perfume. The barstools cried out in agony when you sat on them. But I was young, and this was New York, and there was no safety catch on my dick.

I thought it was Mick's bar; he was there so often, but Joe the bartender put me in the know. When I asked if Mickey owned the bar, he responded with an abrupt "no". He declined any further questions.

I later learned from "Stoolie," the bar's resident blind person, that the bar was owned by a different Mickey Spillane, the author's cousin, known as "the Gentleman Gangster, an Irish mobster in control of Hell's Kitchen's Irish Mob. He was murdered at the age of forty-three while trying to broker a truce between the Irish Gangs and the Italian Mafia. His son Robert 'accidentally' fell out of a 6th story window years later, but that's another story.

Maybe it was the delinquent atmosphere that brought Mickey to ruminate at a side table. He always sat with a yellow legal pad, busy taking notes. I recognized him immediately. Mick's mug was on the backside of his many paperbacks. The frontispiece was always a broad whose tits were just about breaking through her blouse, my kind of girl.

Mick was always wearing a suit, usually of brown tweed. His Borsalino hat was on the table next to an uncorked bottle of 'Early Times' Whiskey. Irish whisky was never visible. They smuggled it down from Canada to avoid the NY State liquor tax, but it was available in unmarked amber bottles that the bartender kept out of sight.

I introduced myself as a college student, a budding writer, and a fan. Mick looked up and smiled, his whimsical expression often captured when he starred as Mike Hammer on the silver screen.

"You gay?"

He said as he busied himself rifling through the assorted papers spread out in front of him.

That wasn't an off-the-wall question. In those days, as there is now, a sizable contingent of homosexuals working out of gay bars on "Restaurant Row" (46th Street). Just a few blocks from Times Square, scantily clad streetwalkers frequented bars, ushered clients into upstairs apartments. Homosexual hustlers were on their knees sucking cock in the Adult Movie theaters. Half-naked trannies in search of Johns, late at night, wandered east from their stations under the twin level Westside Highway.

This was back before the highway's upper level collapsed with an earth-shattering roar in the middle of a cold December night--one overloaded dump truck too many. The upper level was never rebuilt. Pieces of it serve as a freestanding park and garden space.

Several weeks before, late at night, I'd borrowed my Dad's car and driven to midtown. There, across from a theatrical marque, the crowds were long gone. I purchased a terrific twenty-five dollar blow job from "Star," a good-looking big breasted black female hooker. In the privacy of an empty parking-lot, I saw paradise and thought I'd found a friend.

Once Disney revitalized the area in the mid-nineties, Times Square turned into a vanilla family paradise with concerts, M&M stores, family restaurants, and big-box clothing stores once found only on 5th Avenue. In earlier times midtown was a smorgasbord of sexual delight. Cunt, cock, ass-pussy, and tits were all for sale. What more could the many clients and jaded tourists want in Babylon? Drive-through blow jobs were available in the front seat of your car if you picked up a hooker at the Lincoln tunnel entrance. For the more aristocratic, brothels abounded in fancy neighborhoods.

Before I could answer, Mick added, "I got nothin' against the gays, but I only let women or trannies suck my big dick."

"Me too," I answered. "That is, I'm not gay."

Having established the headboard of our relationship, that neither of us was gay, Mick and I became friends. In time, Mick became a mentor, reading my stories and poems.

"Stay away from the poems, Kid. There's no dough in them."

Mick had a good laugh at an article I'd written for the college newspaper about the nefarious bums and grifters in New York City.

"Yeah, kid, you got that right on target."

This was back before the excuse of alcoholism, mental illness, and drug addiction among the homeless became common knowledge and almost acceptable.

"Thanks, Sir."

"Don't use the 'Sir' unless my father walks in," said Mick. I'm not expecting him. He's buried over in New Jersey." He smiled the half split-lip smile.

"I'd never give those bums a plugged nickel unless they gave me something in return. Some of the bums (the word homeless was not yet in the vernacular) have some really crazy stories. You gotta mine-'em for whatever they got, then flip-'em a buck."

I must have shot the breeze with Mick a thousand times. Well, let's say a hundred times, on those hot damp summer nights when the black ho's would come into the bar just before closing time. One of Mick's favorites was Daisy. She was as tall as he, with two watermelon breasts, a curvy ass, and luminous golden skin tone. She had a smile that spread from ear to ear and pearly whites to match. She'd come in, usually with one or two of her 'sisters.' and Mick would invite us all back to his place.

We'd follow Mick two blocks over to the Whitby Building on 45th St, where he did most of his serious writing for a few hours during the day. It was a small apartment but the bulding had once been an actor's hotel. Unfortunately, it had become dingy since the time when Al Capone and assorted famous starlites had lived there while performing in Broadway Shows.

The building, no longer an actor's hotel, was now populated by tenants stuck on the lowest rung and falling backward. Some were rungless, whores, or junkies not even on the ladder. You may have seen The Whitby where they filmed the apartment sex scenes in "The Deuce" for HBO."

Mick had three gorgeous blond wives, but he always lived apart from them. This allowed him the freedom to court and fuck the women whom he enjoyed the most.

"There's something about a pro, a black ho. Of course, ya oughta use a rubber, but they know something about pleasing a man that a wife never learned. No one can suck cock better than a Harlem ho.

Mick was considerably older than I was, but he would say,

"You just show me where and when, I can still plant the seed," His seed planting was never slowed by his first two wives. Mick changed wives as frequently as he changed cars,--every twenty years.

Mick's first wife was a homemaker. They lived in Hell's Kitchen. Later Mick moved the family to New Jersey. His most famous wife was the flamboyant Sherry, a beautiful sexy number who might have been torn from the cover of one of his detective stories. She was also as vindictive and heartless as the protagonist in his novel, 'Death Finds You Sleeping.' Mick's last wife, Jane, was a beauty contestant winner and, as we'd say on the street, a real piece of ass. She married him when he was close to seventy and she was only twenty-seven, a divorcee with two kids in tow.

When I first knew Mick, it was after he and his first wife divorced. He was married to Sherry but they didn't always live together. Mick loved New York City, and he wouldn't spend summers at Morrell's Inlet in South Carolina where he had his home. He had discovered the place from the air when he was a pilot. He loved to be there in the cooler months, but in summer he'd said the bugs were as big as hummingbirds..

"It gets hot enough down there to boil your balls, and then mosquitos start to eat them."

Come the fall, he'd say goodbye and retreat to his semi-tropical paradise. He somehow managed to retain the home through his divorces. He'd said he'd been one of the first to buy and built a home on the water. Others followed and Mick said,

"It's getting as cramped down there as New York City. You can't even pull over on a dirt road and take a piss that a carload of tourists doesn't flag you."

Mick would come back to NYC for the late spring and summer months. That's when I'd get a call.

"I'll be in town next Friday. Bring me something good to read.

I was still nursing a fantasy that I was going to follow in Mick's footsteps. I'd been working on a detective story about a murder at the city waterworks. The killer was an irate female homeowner whose home water was slowly turning a sickly yellow. She followed the supervisor from his office to a bar and got friendly with him. They ended up having sex in a motel. When the guy fell asleep, the lady slit his throat. She left a note signed, "The Nightingale." Mick liked the premise and asked if I'd mind if he borrowed the scene which he later elaborated into a short story called "The Nightingales Last Song." Of course, I was flattered by his interest.

As the night grew late, several black ho's were seated at Mick's table. He was regaling them with war stories, and they were enjoying every minute. Now you might think Mick was a pulp fiction fake, he wasn't. He was a fighter pilot during the Second World War and tougher than a prizefighter. Around midnight, Mick stood up,

"Ladies, would you care to accompany my young friend and me back to my apartment for a nightcap?" Then as an aside, he shouted to Joe (the bartender), "Are you coming up?"

Of course, Joe was coming.

Our late-night soirees would start with raucous disco music, already out of date. Mick had a reel-to-reel tape deck that he'd ask me to turn on. Unfortunately, the tape was always tangled, cutting Gloria Gaynor's disco song short.

Mick would pick one of the girls, usually Daisy, and start dancing. He was quite a good dancer, light on his feet. "There's nothing better than a black chick for dancing," he'd say, as he squeezed Daisy's big tits against his chest and cupped both hands on her curvy backside.

Once the 'Fred Astaire and Daisy' show ended, a whiskey-fueled orgy often began where partners would be swapped even in mid-fuck. Even If her pussy was being filled, no gal's mouth ever went to waste. When the night ended, Mick would hand each chick two $200 bills as they exited. Most of them were higher than a kite. In those days, a ho would earn $20 or $25 a trick, so $200 was good earnings plus all the booze they could drink.

Don't ask me why, but back then, Mick called me Dugan. It wasn't my name, but he made up nicknames for his friends,

"It's easier to remember," he'd say, "when you hit my age, memory can go in a twenty-second spurt."

Around that time, between midnight parties, I got a long distance call from my Aunt in Jacksonville, Florida telling me that my cousin Janice had disappeared. "Is there any chance you could find her?"

"It's a very big city Aunt Lil, what do you know about her?

My Aunt said Janice has taken an office job in NYC. When she asked what work Janice's was doing, "Oh some Betty Page stuff, they have a specialized clothing line."

My Aunt didn't know who Betty Page was, she assumed she was a designer like Halston. Still, from the way Janice spoke of her boss. Lil was afraid Janice was messing around. I knew Janice when she was just a kid, but that news didn't surprise me. Most of the girls in my family were pretty loose.

Mick saw I was preoccupied, and when I spilled the beans, he said,

"Come on, Dugan, git up off your fat ass. We'll go find the cunt tonight."

My name wasn't Dugan and I didn't think my ass was fat, but I didn't argue.

Mick made a few phone calls based on Janice's last known address. He tracked down her roommate who knew more than my Aunt and then passed this new information to a police captain in upper Manhattan.

The next thing I knew, we were walking over to 10th Street where Mick kept his white XK120 Jag hidden away in a garage. An attendant greeted us and opened the sliding metal door. As wide as Mickey was, he somehow slid into the small sport's car that fired up immediately. With a loud roar, he drove down the winding ramp and off into the street. With the convertible top down, we headed south towards Twenty-third Street on the Westside.

I noticed a sign on the dashboard that read, " XK120 Land Speed Record 1953."

"What is that? "

"What is what?"

"The sign on the dashboard."

"A souped-up model XK120 with a bubble windscreen that won the production car speed record, 173 mph. Jaguar puts that placard on all the XK120s."

"Nice."

"So this Janice we're tracking was your kissing cousin," said Mick.

"Well, it went a bit beyond just kissing. Janice was a cute kid the last time I saw her. She must be 25 by now." I saw no need to reveal we were into heavy petting back then.

"I never fuck women over 35," said Mick. "The young ones are like a shot of adrenalin when ya poke-em. The older ones are a barrel of neuroses."

"Yeah, you can say that again."

"So ya poked her?"

I avoided the question, "We lost touch when I went off to college."

"Blond or brunette."

"Neither, a redhead."

Mick began to speak in an Irish brogue, "Oh dem Irish redheads are always trouble. Most of them got that crazy gene."

"Yeah, you're right bout that."

We passed an overturned older sedan on the side of the highway. I leaned out and could see four people inside squirming to get out through the shattered windows.

"Should we stop?

"You some kind of a doctor?"

"Nope."

"Then don't mess with it. Good Samaritans finished last in this town."

We drove on past the wreck. Mike took the next exit, pulled off the highway, and made a left turn. We ended up in a dockside industrial area. We scanned the fronts of the buildings for street numbers.

"That's the one."

Mick parked the car at the broken curb ten feet from a precarious leaning telephone pole.

"Let's hope the timber don't flatten the car."

I was a bit of an architecture buff, having been on a few architectural tours. From the looks of the building, I guessed it had been there since the civil war. It was a tenement. Initially, these were cold-water flats modernized fifty or seventy-five years back, probably before anyone paid attention to building codes. On the left there were a series of metal mailboxes, mostly broken. We found the name Giswald written on adhesive tape on the box for apartment 2B.

"That's the guy," said Mick.

We walked slowly up the creaky stairs. The first door off the landing had a faded marker 2B. You could practically see through the cracked door where someone had used glue and plywood to repair it. With one well-placed kick of Mick's size twelve shoe, the door flew open. We rushed in.

Griswald stood in the living room hovering over Janice with one hand on her knee. He was wearing a dirty wife-beater and nude from the waist down. Oddly he was wearing white socks and laced two-tone shoes. What was going on? It didn't look good. Janice was tied to a wooden chair, her legs spread, her pert naked tits were pointing forward. I was shocked to see she was completely nude. A cloth rag was stuffed into her mouth. Griswald was holding something in his other hand that turned out to be a razor.

Griswald turned towards us. The crashing door had interrupted his assault.

Mick took one look at Janice and shouted her name. She began to nod furiously. Mick flicked open the metal buckle on his Rolex bracelet and slid it down over his fist. He moved forward like lightning and cocked Griswald right on the tip of the jaw. The power of Mick's blow spun him around as Griswald fell to the floor, looking as if he'd parachuted off a cliff. The kidnapper lay in a heap. His lights were out. No one was home.

Janice recognized me as soon as I busied myself untying her.

"You're Truman, my cousin."

"Yeah, you got that right," I said, looking down at her tits. "You've sure grown-up--big."

The rope tying her was a plastic clothesline and slippery to unravel.

"How did you find me?"

"Your Mom said you were missing. Mick spoke to your roomie and once he knew where you worked he got a few tips from a Cop he knows. He traced you to this dump. Seems your guy Griswald was known for this type of stunt. He'd have been in jail but he'd terrified his previous victim who refused to testify against him."

As she pulled loose, I realized I was standing on a pile that turned out to be her clothes. I stepped back. Once free, she stood up slowly and quickly put on her outfit.

"My bra, my panties. Where did they go?"

I had to admit even with the missing bra, she looked, shall we say, very fit. As for the panties, I figured it best she went commando.

Mick said, "Listen, Kid, we gotta get out of here before the dock workers start arriving."

"Yeah, let's go."

Once untied, Janice was too stiff to make it out the door unsupported, but she stumbled over to Griswold and gave him a few kicks that he'd no doubt remember the next time he pissed.

Mick had picked up the razor. "What was going on with this?"

"He said he had to shave my snatch before he would rape me. But he had plenty of fun with me up to that point. Maybe he was afraid I'd picked up lice from the scum he was selling me too. I figured he'd kill me when he was finished pimping me. But, in the meantime the dockworkers nearly fucked me to death."

"Very likely," said Mick, "Some of these longshoreman fuckers can be very mean."

"He'd pour booze down my throat. I was so drunk I don't even remember how many guys were on top of me last night. Thank God you arrived. I wouldn't have lasted much longer. That was one experience I hope to never repeat.

She turned to me, pointing at Mick, "Who's the heavy?"

"Janis, this is my friend Mickey Spillane." If she recognized his name, she made no comment, but she ran and threw her arms around Mick. Yhat was when I realized her eyes were all swollen and bloodshot.

"My hero! How did you find me? You arrived just in time. I couldn't go through another night with that bastard. "

Mick untangled her arms from around his neck and spoke,

"Hi doll, guess you've had a bad taste of the rats in this sewer, but it's over."

We lifted her up by her arms and half carried her out the door. When we got outside, a gang of punks were sitting on the trunk of the car.

Mick pulled out a ten-er saying,

"Thanks, kids, for minding the car."

The gang nodded. Mick and I got into the small car. I managed to seat Janice onto my lap. In her state of undress doing, minor acrobatics to fit on top of me, gave the gang a gander at her pussy. They all smiled at that. As we drove uptown her short skirt rolled up and her bare butt tickled my cock. I tried unsuccessfully to keep from getting an erection.