Lenny & Tooty

As a kid, and after I became an adult, I had a lot of friends from different age groups, but mostly older..  Lenny was in my age group, we grew up together and we went to the same elementary school. And our friendship  continued into our adult years until Lenny developed a fatal brain tumor, which was discovered after he was in his sixties. 

Lenny look alike, Errol Flynn

Another one was Milf.  Real name, Milford.  Boy oh boy, did he hate that name.  And I agreed with him, it was a terrible name for a kid in that era.  But, I would  not call him John, which is the name he picked out for himself and liked.  To me he just didn't look like a John.   So I called him Milf.     And then, later,  I gave him a nickname that stuck, Tooty.  He had pretty boy looks with black, curly curls all over his head and he was very  well built. Tooty  was not much of a gambler, and never much of a sports playing kid either, except for pool (Billiards) which we all played, for money.  In pool, my best talent was staying out of games where I was over matched and had no chance of winning.  Of course that 'learning curve' was costly.  Whenever the rest of us went to play baseball or other sports Tooty was always somewhere else.
He lived with his parents in an apartment over a fruit store, a business they owned.    His chores, every day, were to get up early, before school, and load the fruit and vegetable stands in front of the store.  When the stands were filled his job was over and he would go to school and do whatever for the rest of the day.. 
He was the reason I tried huckstering.  He convinced me to do it because he could pretty much put a basket full of vegetables under each arm, so he thought anybody could do it.    He told me how much I could make in the alleys selling corn, for example, and how to go down to the  wharf and buy a bushel basket of corn or whatever I wanted to sell.  To me, in my mind, what I was going to do was determined by how much I could make, not on how hard it was to carry the stuff.  What a dumbbell.  Uh, oh.  I'm just putting this stuff down as I write and this post is supposed to be about both Lenny and Tooty.. 

Lenny had what was considered the classic good looks of the day.  Very masculine, he had to shave already, and he looked older, so most girls were as impressed with him as they were with Tooty.  Tooty had pretty boy, no beard, 'Tyrone Power', type looks, while Lenny was more in the 'Erroll Flynn' category.  

Further down, from where Tooty lived, on Sixtieth Street, near Spruce Street, known as  the drugstore corner where the downtown trolley turned east before stopping to pick-up passengers, there was another fruit store with a stand outside. The apartments on the second and third floors, atop this fruit store, were empty.  So a group of us, including both Lenny and Tooty, made a lease deal with the owner.  If he would fix the 2nd floor apartment into one long room.     It had a bath at the far end.  When the knocking down of the walls was finished we rented it from him for a year and it became our club house.  The club dues were pretty much for paying the rent.  Soon it had two sofas, one along each wall, and a table on one side with a small Bakelite radio on its rectangular top.  Also on top was a separate Philco turntable, which played dance music records.  The audio was played through the radio.. 
We used the club mostly for gambling.  We shot craps against the walls, we played cards, and we did all kinds of other gambling stuff.  While I was not a good card player, the rest of the members were terrible.  And I was a good learner, so I learned how to play gin, pinochle, hearts and a little bridge.  I was a terrible poker player because I could not stay out of a hand, and that continued to cost me as I got older.  But later when I was invited to play in higher stakes poker games, I just didn't play. Guys who cant stay out of hands, just get killed. 
Over the weekends we tried to convince girls to come up and (?) dance.  It became such a headache to the owner that he told us he wasn't going to renew the lease.  And then at the end of the year he went and  rented the club to a jealous rival gang who were all from a little outside of our neighborhood.  I think the landlord did this because we caused him so much trouble with noise and other misbehavior stuff and . . they paid him a little more rent.

There were three memorable incidents that happened at the club.  One was, we convinced this Tooty girl she could become a member of the club if she made out with every member of the club,. 
A 'Tooty girl' . . .whenever we went to a dance, Tooty would wait until dancing was well underway and then he would ask one of the 'not yet' dancing girls, to dance.  Sometimes he would wait until there was only one girl  not dancing.  When he was asked about his selections, he responded with, "Did your score yesterday?  I did." His selections became known as Tooty girls.
So Tooty convinced this Tooty girl she had to go through 'hazing' in order to join the club.  After (almost) every member got into her pants.  She got the nickname, 'Fish'.  And she was allowed to come up to the club whenever another member were present.  It was her  fascination with Tooty.  After that, a lot of times, when you went up the stairs and into the club room, you would notice her on the far couch mostly all mixed up with another member. 

Its not one of my favorite memories because  I realize now she just wanted to be with everybody else.  Its not an excuse.  Its was just the way kids like us did stuff.   Just like today, kids don't understand real consequences caused by doing stuff.  And, of course mostly because they don't want to..

Look! Look!  I got one.

Anyway a coupla weeks after she started coming upstairs we noticed Fred scratching himself like crazy and we kept telling  him to cut it out when one member said, "What the hell is the matter with you?  You got the crabs or something?"  
It was just something someone said out loud.  I don't know about anybody else, but crabs were something I had no clue about and I didn't want the other guys to know I was ignorant about the subject..
Well anyway, by this time we knew how to get into the third floor apartment, which had several rooms, and in one of them there was an old rickety table and some chairs.  And also by this time there was only one or two members of the club who had  not made out with the Fish. .  One of them was selected to go upstairs and help see who was infected.  We got him a magnifying glass.   I don't know where the hell it came from.  Looking back the result was hilarious. 
One by one we went up and sat on edge of the table with our pants down, and got examined under the magnifying glass.  When we came down, we sent another guy up.  The funny thing is the only other guy who had not been with the Fish, was Fred.   But he wanted to go up too and ironically, he was the guy who started the whole thing..  He was a wannabe member whose parents tried to keep a tight hold on him, and he wasn't allowed out much.  Anyway, no one thought it was necessary for him to go up for an exam because he was not the type.  He was, what we called a square.  His father was a lawyer and they had a house on 62nd and Larchwood Avenue.  Their house had an enclosed porch and the  furniture in it was more valuable than any of us had in our entire home, except maybe Lenny.  And they had a full time housekeeper every day of the week except Sunday. 
There was this thing about Fred, he was what you call hairy.  He had hair all over the place and especially on his chest and body.  Anyway he kept insisting and insisting he wanted to go up, until someone asked, "What harm is there?"  So he became the last examinee.   A couple of minutes after he went up we hear a shout.  We all run upstairs to the exam room..  There was Fred, practically naked, sitting on the table, and even from the doorway, you could see he was covered with something.  He had crabs all over.  Even in the hair in his arm pits.
By now we all knew what we were looking for and why.   No wonder he wanted to go upstairs. 
So we collected some money and sent someone to the drugstore, it was only about a block or so away.  The gofer bought and returned with some bottles of Cuprex.  I think that was the name.  We gave one bottle to Fred, he had supplied a dollar of the money and he needed the stuff the most.  We used the other bottles for every one else to use..  Medicinal prices in those days were still reasonable.



Afterward, Fred said he started putting Cuprex on his shoulders and by the time he got to the top of his legs he could see them beginning to fall off.  Which reminds me  of a joke I learned when I was a kid.  I may have put a sanitized version of this joke in an earlier post on my blog.  Goes like this.......

Cute little bugger

'To cure the crabs, you start with a bottle of alcohol and a magnifying mirror.  You rub a liberal amount of alcohol onto your  private parts area and put the magnifying mirror on the floor.  Then, after you wait a little while, so the crabs have time to consume the alcohol, you stand over the mirror, legs wide apart.   Make sure you give the crabs enough time to get drunk.  Then, when they look down and see these much larger private parts, they will jump down, eager to be on the bigger pair of testicles, and kill themselves when they land on the hard glass of the mirror.'
Oh yeah, Fred's explanation was, he was messing around with the housekeeper.
In one of the other  two incidents Lenny was featured.  It was a fist fight between the toughest kid in the club that now occupied our old clubhouse, and Lenny.  At first we thought Tooty would fight the guy, but they tossed a coin and Lenny won. (Or lost)  Lenny and this other kid went into the middle of 60th street and beat the hell out of each other with Lenny declared the winner when his opponent quit.  He said he thought he had broken his leg.. The fist fight in the middle of sixtieth was the talk of the neighborhood for months afterward because quite a few passersby paused to watch.  And Lenny became a local hero.

The next thing happened after the new club took over, they took extra care to lock the club up when they left.  And they let this guy sleep there as a way of guarding the place by keeping someone inside.   I  knew the watcher and it was not unusual for him to take me up to keep him company.



They hadn't made too many changes and the watcher showed me where they kept a 22 revolver.  It was hidden in the back of their record player. I kept telling everybody they kept a gun up there.  But they didn't believe me and pooh poohed it.  So one night when no guard was in the place, one of our guys jimmied the lock and about six of us went up to the second floor.  In those days the gun manufacturers hadn't bought the leaders of the NRA, if there was one, so guns were a rarity. Except those I saw in the movies, I had never seen a real gun.

Toy Capgun

It was almost pitch black in there with just a little illumination coming thru a window from a street lamp outside, on Sixtieth St. ..  It really was dark, but I went over and found the record player,  and put my hand into the back, under the turntable.  Sure enough there it was, still there.  I pulled the gun out.   It looked small, like a toy.  When the other guys saw the gun, they all started saying stuff like  "Ahh its a toy. Are  you kidding?  Its a cap gun."   It really got me going, so I said loudly, "Its a cap gun is it?  Its a toy is it?"  And then I pointed the gun at the far bathroom wall . . . and pulled the trigger.  BAM!!!!   Oh my goodness, it sounded like a clap of thunder. The room was basically empty except for the sofas which were certainly not large enough to absorb the sound.  It reverberated off the walls and scared the hell out of everyone.  Me too.  We thought you could hear it a block away.  We were just kids.   You never saw a faster scramble to get the hell out of there.  We jammed at the doorway and down the narrow stairs to get out of the building.  Whooo.  Afterwards nobody knew what happened to the gun but I found out later.   Tooty got it.  And he  made me promise not to tell anybody. 

This stuff has turned out to be  longer than I thought it would, so I think I will save Lenny's story to make another post.

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