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."
