They Call Him FLIPPER!

Selwyn Harris recounts a 42nd Street fracas so intense, it had him running for the relative comfort and safety of Cinema Kings Highway.

JUNE 2009 EDITOR’S NOTE:

The following story appeared in HAPPYLAND #2, published November 22, 1991.

Selwyn Harris was my pen(is) name, a combination of the monikers of what turned out to be the final two original grindhouses standing on 42nd Street: the Selwyn and the Harris.

It made me the big-shot literary supernova you’ve all loved and worshipped for years.

“They Call Him Flipper” got HAPPYLAND talked about by Gerard Cosloy on WFMU, won me an audience with Gore Gazette publisher Rick Sullivan, was praised in The Village Voice’s Rock-N-Roll Quarterly, and led directly to kicking off my professional writing career at The New York Press and Screw. Hustler soon followed.

I dare say it remains – 18 years, a decade of sobriety, and 100 pounds after the fact – a hoot.

Your Former Selwyn Harris,
McBeardo
*

October 12, 1990
DATELINE: The Deuce

It was the toughest call of the year. The setting couldn’t have been more familiar – Fischel Bocephus and I were in the midst of our weekly Friday night 42nd Street frolic – but a dilemma arose of unprecedented magnitude.

We had been planning to see the just-released Marked for Death featuring a pre-bloat Steven Seagal going ponytail-to-dreads against Rastamen running wild in suburbia, but an amble up to 8th Avenue revealed that Puerto Rican porn goddess Keisha would be at Show World in all her mega-mammaried magnificence. We had one serious fucking decision to make.

I was all in favor of the Lady (note the capital L; that denotes that she’s got CLAAASS). We could drop a ten-spot at the Triple Treat, watch the tropical tasty shake her mangoes, and then each load a buck or two worth of tokens into a private booth and pop sackfuls of coconut milk all over the floor.

No fuss, and just a little muss (and the mop jockey would take care of that).

Fischel, however, was tight on funds, so I made the concession: kicks-in-the-ass won out over tits-and-ass. We approached the Lyric theater (where Marked for Death was playing) and, within seconds, the first omen of things to come was upon us.

You see, to reach the silver-haired (and gold-toothed) Negress in the ticket booth, we had to negotiate our way through a cluster of young Latina pubescitas. Who knew they were in line? (They could just have easily been Keisha’s hometown booster club trying to figure out which way Show World was for all I knew).

It turned out, of course, that they were in line, and the littlest of them let my white ass know this right properly.

“Jew trah dat sheet in my neighborhood,” she informed, “Motherfucker, jew would be sorry!”

I was sorry anyway, and I told her and she said something back, but my Homegirlese was a little rusty, so I have no idea what it was. Maybe she complimented me on the polite promptness of my apology. Maybe.

What we should have taken as the second warning occurred inside the theater, when we saw that there were virtually no seats left. Except for two. In the last row. Behind a pair of boisterous, hearty, well-muscled African-American gents. We sat right down in back of them. This was a bad idea.

These new neighbors of ours, these substance-abusers-of-color, had been whooping it up and having a fine night out at the theater. Bully for them. They were occupying the first three seats in from the aisle, leaving an empty chair between them, which they utilized as a handy dumping ground for their empty 40-ounce malt liquor bottles. How ingenious! Eco-conscious, too! Thus far, they had made five deposits and were well into prepping numbers six and seven.

Fischel and I assumed, though Christ knows why, that even though our homeys were conversing throughout the opening credits, once the actors on-screen started talking, they would stop. Ha. Ha. Ha.

The degenerate duo continued in their give-and-take as casually and mellifluously as though they were in line for food stamps or engaged in any other of their day-to-day activities, but with one minor adjustment: to be heard above the movie’s war-whoops, flying limbs and artillery fire, the dreadful discoursers upped their volume. Considerably. My ears have never endured such a trial, and yours haven’t either.

It’s not as though their talk wasn’t engaging - it was - but it was knocking plaster off the ceiling.

STEPIN: “Yo! Hushmush muffusk shih huffmuckfuck! HA-ha-HA!”

FETCHIT: “Ah heah DAT! Ha ha ha ha!”

Still, what were we to do? Raise our index fingers to our puckered lips and say, “Do you MIND!?!”, punctuating each syllable with a tap maybe? It probably wouldn’t have worked. And so the Nasty Negroid Noise-a-Thon continued.

And then it actually got LOUDER upon its taking a universally provocative direction: oh, the power of pussy!

The lilting Latinas that I had seemingly wronged outside were now inside and searching for seats. Within seconds, our heroes were searching the seats of the girls’ pants.

“LOOKIT DAT ASS!” the more vociferous of the two yelled to the other one who was not two feet away from him.

“YOU KNOW AH KNOWS IT!,” came the response. “YOU KNOW AH KNOWS IT!”

Considering the volume of the response, all those lucky bastards up the block at Show World probably knew he knewed it, too.

The boyz [sic] tried to slap each other five. They missed.

“JEW BETTER WATCH IT, NIGGA!” the lass with dat ass shouted back. And, wow, it was none other than my bon-bon from the box office. What a firecracker!

But ever the veral gamesman, the Mad Chatter turned her warning around by announcing: “You right, bitch! I’ll watch it! I’ll watch yo ass all night! Fuck da muffcukin’ moobie!”

What a display of one-upsmanship. He wasn’t done yet, though – oh, no!

“And if y’all doan like it,” he continued, “I’ll lookit yo man’s ass an’ fuck ya’s all! Whooo-hahahahaha!”

After that surprising declaration of sexual liberation, the brothers made good on the high five. The audience was pleased too, showering the unexpected performer with laughter applause, “HO SHITS!”, and that annoying HOO-HOO-HOO sound.

Fischel and I, in the meantime, were cement. We sat feigning fixation on a movie that we could neither hear for all the brouhaha, nor could we see for all the dark-skinned limbs flailing in felicitation. We were scared. Shitless.

We were spared true, unadulterated terror, however, until Super blurted to Fly: “AH GOTS TO PESS!” The meant he would be moving. HO SHIT!

The junk-jockey’s rise from his seat and subsequent struggle to reach the aisle made for some show (when we dared to watch). It played like a spastic ballet run alternately in high-speed and slow motion. The verbal accompaniment to this display, though many crack-hits removed from English, was clearly profane and absolutely deafening.

Fischel and I cowered, waiting for him to spot us and declare: “Look! Two muffuckin’ wat-ass wat boys sittin’ behind me, gibbin me the muffuckin’ evil eye, make me walk all fucked up! KILL DA RACIST MUFFUCKAS! Come on, everybody!”

It seemed fortunate at the time that such a moment never came. In retrospect, perhaps it wasn’t.

For the next five minutes, the collective consciousness of everyone in the Lyric (and, likely, deep into Times Square) was possessed by the broadcasts of the bathroom-bound Ubangi.

He and his partner in pipe-passing were going to prove that they had not yet BEGUN to yell.

Once our odiferous Odysseus had reached the steps that led to the john one flight below, he found them far too steep to navigate.

In fairness, after a few brown-bagged tall-boys, I have to watch my footing on that staircase. So Leroy Lobotomy was either going to plunge down those steps as violently as King Kong getting blown off the Empire State Building (which is what we were hoping he was going to do) or he was going to give up and come back as titanically pissed off as King Kong climbing UP the Empire State Building (which, of course, is what he did do).

Before heading back though, he treated us to his every meditation on this predicament, baying to his fray-end: “STAIHZ, MAN! Muffuckin’ STAIHZ!”

“PESS, MAN! PESS!” the other guy shouted back.

“HOW DA FUCK KAI PESS?! STAIHZ … too muffuckin’ TALL! STAIHZ too HAH UP!”

“CHILL DEN, MAN! JUSS CHILL!”

And for a minute, miraculously, he did. He had to. This last exchange posed an all-too-serious threat to the sound barrier. But this silence seethed. This was a truly pregnant pause. And then it whelped.

“STAAAAAIIIIHHHHHHZZZZZZ!!!!!”

This wail was the sound of a man on fire. Degenerate, drug-addicted fire. This was the sound of our worst white-boy nightmare. How were we to face this?

I’ll tell you how: by sitting tight, sweating blood, and trying hard not to “pess” our pants.

When Grandmaster Brash careened back to his chair, he had changed. Gone was the happy-go-yukky harasser of Hispanics, what fumed not six inches before us now was a pent-up Brahma Bull of chocolate fury, with an ego crushed by being unable to conquer simple ambulation, compounded by his having told the whole freakin’ world about it.

How would you feel?

How would you cope?

Would you seemingly slip off into another dimension (even though you had already been in the Sixth Dimension from the get-go)?

Would you take one of your empty Colt 45 bottles, place it on the back of the seat in front of you and then rest your head on it as though it were a pillow?

Would you start to bob back and forth?

Would you chant?

Would a stream-of-consciousness mish-mash fall from your thick, meaty lips running the gamut from customarily obscene (“Smash muffucks up … punch homeboy in the shit!”) into plain old Orangutanese (“Ha-ee-EYE-oon-us, eep-ork-uh-uh!”)?

As your rant grew, would you begin to tap its beat out against the bottle with your forehead?

That’s what our buddy did. And our hearts beat along with him like jungle drums from his Continent of Origin all the while.

“Chill, man!” his buddy said. He was turning into a regular Afrik-Ann Landers.

But as the rap grew louder and the glass drumstick fell harder, our already packed-to-capacity colons filled with even more wages of fear, the Mad Mandigo mumbled a prophecy: “Gonna flip, man,” he said.

This revelation alarmed even his comrades-in-harms. “No, man, you gots to chill!” he begged.

“Gonna flip,” the whacked-out Watusi announced even louder. He was no longer just tapping the bottle. Now he was swinging the fucking thing. And with each “clang” of it against the seat in front of him, he insisted again that was “Gonna flip!”

“No, man! CHILL!”

What was frightening was how frightening his friend had become.

“FLIP! MAN! AH MO FLIP!”

“Chill!-chill!-chill!-chill!-chill!-chill!….” Now the other guy was chanting.

All life within the Lyric had come to a complete halt. The atmosphere was akin to panic-in-a-bottle and each cry of “FLIP!” followed by a vain plea of “CHILL!” grabbed the bottle and rattled it up and move the cork that held the chaos in check that much further up the neck … that much closer toward brutal, imminent explosion.

It moved inch…

“FLIP! FLIPPIN! FLIP!”

… by inch …

CLUNK! (that’s the sound of the malt liquor container hitting the chair)

… by inch …

“FUH-LIP! FUH-huh-HUH-HUH-LIIIIHHH-PIN!”

… until …

“DAT’S IT, MAN! AHM GWAN FLIP!”

… POP!

He propelled up from his seat as though launched from a missile silo. He leaped and spun around in our direction, dispersing an orbit of beer in a perfect half-circle. His huge body surged and grew huger. He dug his fingers into the seams of his button-down shirt and, in a moment of drama that Lou Ferrigno or Ted Kennedy could only dream of, burst the cloth open and flexed his musculature.

All we saw were rolling eyes and gnashing teeth. All we heard was the plaintive cry that rings in my ears to this day:

“AHMMMM FLIPPIN!!!”

Freeze. Die. Come to life.

We head to go and go right fucking now. For an instant, Fischel, who was blocking the aisle, did not move. I was afraid he had died of fright. I socked him in the arm in hopes of dispelling any rigor mortis. Apparently it worked because when I shouted “Go! GO!”, we went went.

The Flash himself (who was portrayed on the TV by a homosexual; did you know that?) couldn’t beat the floor-speed record I seat tearing from our seats to the video games near the lobby.

For one millisecond, I glanced behind me and saw that:

A) I was Steve McQueen in a live-action recreation the terrified-crowd-flees-the-movie-theater scene from The Blob, and

B) The Blob itself, Flipsey Russell, was ripping up the linoleum (not to mention hunks of his nappy ’do) right alongside everyone else storming out in my direction. Tonight, he was on the loose!

I buried my chin in my chest and hurled myself through the lobby doors and smack into a couple of cops outside puffin’ butts.

Throwing on the brakes as best I could, I croaked: “There’s a guy flippin’ out in there!”

“Oh?”, said one officer, and before he could even turn to look, a crush of horror-stricken humanity burst through the doorway, screaming, and with volcanic velocity spilled out all over our most beloved of boulevards.

Somehow, I signaled where I was to Fischel as he was being carried off by this tide, and he breast-stroked his way toward me.

The cops threw themselves against the onslaught, looking very much like a pair of blue salmon swimming up-tide in an overwhelmingly muddy stream.

Fischel and I jaunted across the street, past the Papaya King, and we just kept jaunting, not even speaking, until we reached the peep-show on 40th and 7th. And we didn’t stop until we hear a beat-cop’s radio buzz alive and order him to report to 213 West 42nd for “assistance with an emotionally disturbed person.”

The Fuzz turned on his two flat feet and soared off.

“Maybe there’ll be a shootout,” I said. “That would be cool.”

Fischel and I automatically headed back toward the Deuce.

By the time we could see the theater, no less than 30 keepers-of-the-peace were descending on the joint like it was nickel-donut night inside.

EMS was there, and a paddy-wagon, and even a bunch of police dogs. I tried to pet one of the pups, but his butch-in-blue owner made me stop. Jealous, honey?

The crowd swelled and theorized about the source of this commotion. One middle-aged Central American gent proposed: “Maybe whoever was eeenside got too close to City Hall corrup-shee-own!”

Then he removed his porkpie hat, gobbed a wad of phlegm into it, and put it back on his head.

Then the moment we had been dreading came to fruition. The Blue Sea rolled forward and five cops dragged Rodney Allen Flippey out of the theater nary a single bullet-hole. But he was nice and bloodied up.

His faux-Hanes tank-top was drenched crimson and his nose gushed like Jed Clampett’s lucky acre. Obviously, the law had used his noggin like a lacrosse ball.

Never, before or since, have I been so proud of this city’s police force.

New York’s finest, indeed… MUFFUCKAS!

*

JUNE 2009 UPDATE

All the details of “Flipper” are true, except for the guy spitting in his hat. But he really was proposing a conspiracy beat-down in action.

Any other lies all involve the great Fischel Bocephus – my roommate at the time and my best friend for years.

I like how I claim that he, who held a real job and handled all the apartment finances, was short on funds. Plus the general air that he was somehow not quite as slick as I was. What an ass. Me, I mean.

What’s interesting, looking back, is that I was still attempting to create the impression that I was this “nice guy” who just happened to find himself in these sleazy, violent, filthy situations all the time.

It’s embarrassing to acknowledge that I thought such an image would help me score chicks (youthful racial insensitivity apparently did not constitute a similar obstacle).

And I suppose the schtick worked – but not nearly as effectively as when I finally ’fessed up to full-on pervitude. Oddly, that didn’t happen until after I got sober.

There’s a lesson in there. Scoop it out and use it.

I now possess the entire run of HAPPYLAND (thank you, Mr. Rovito and Mrs. Lynn, and I will create PDFs for your punishment/edification.

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