Only Murders in the Building (2025)

 

Barney Miller (1975)

 

Only Murders in the Building (2024)

 

30 Rock (2009)

 

30 Rock (2008)

 

30 Rock (2007)

 

30 Rock (2006)

 

Only Murders in the Building (2023)

 

Only Murders in the Building (2022)

 

Cold turkey in Harlem by Ian Walker (New Society, 6 March 1980)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

Cold turkey in Harlem by Ian Walker

Heroin addiction is becoming an increasing worry in Britain. This is the New York scene.

Salvatore Domani—the surname means “tomorrow”—glanced round the bar to make sure no one was looking, then rolled up his shirtsleeve to show me a small scar on his inside left arm. “I reckon I musta shot $250,000 worth of heroin into there,” he said.

Salvatore, his friends call him Sal, kicked the habit five years ago. The State Department estimated that in New York City, during 1979, there were approximately 164.000 who hadn’t kicked it. Another 35.000 or so New Yorkers are now hooked on a lime-green liquid called methadone, invented by German scientists in world war two and now given out free to heroin addicts by the New York City Methadone Maintenance Programme.

This is a story about the effect of a drug on a city. About a life on the streets led by Sal when he was pumping $300 worth of heroin into his veins daily. About the administrators who run New York’s methadone programme. About some old Chinese men who were opium addicts when they came over to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and who now meet every day in a room on the fourth floor of the Lower East Side Service Centre in Chinatown to drink methadone, smoke cigarettes and talk.

I met Sal in a bar in Brooklyn. His father was a Sicilian sailor who raised the family in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn. “The streets were mean and I ran with mean people, tough kids who’d commit burglaries and homicide, no trouble,” said Sal, who started working when he was nine, as a butcher’s boy. Now, at 32, he works in the machine room at the New York Daily News. His father died young; so he was, he said, “the man of the house from the age of twelve.” Which meant he had neither the time nor the money to get involved in the drug culture till he was much older.

Sal remembers the first time he snorted heroin. He was at someone’s house. A friend brought out a plate with a mountain of heroin. “He said, ‘C’mon, you won’t get hooked just doing it once. You of all people.’ Me, the street-wise tough kid. I tried it and it was a big mistake,” he laughed. “But I only know that now.”

Whether they quit the drug or not, junkies have to live with the sensation heroin provides for the rest of their lives. The temptation never goes away. Even now, five years after he kicked, Sal gets almost ecstatic describing the euphoria: “An eighth or a sixteenth of a teaspoon of powder on the tip of a matchstick. Two or three inhalations and the feeling that comes over you is absolutely unbelievable. I can’t equate it with nothing. Not sexual orgasm, not winning money. It’s the greatest, the grandaddy of them all. There’s no other feeling, none . . . and when you get to the point when you send it into your pit [veins] no words can describe it.”

He continued snorting but, as is always the case, the dosage increases while the euphoria diminishes. Meanwhile, the amount of powder Sal was snorting was destroying the tissues in his nose. “On the street, the expression for getting a syringe is ‘getting your wings.’ Some junkies pride themselves on giving somebody their wings. Others will say, ‘I ain’t giving you any injection. I’m not gonna be the one to give you your fucking wings’.”

To inject heroin, junkies put the powder in a bottle cap with a few drops of water and “cook it up,” heat the cap over a lit match until the liquid starts to bubble: that’s the heroin solution. And that’s what is injected, first into the muscular tissue and then, just a short time later, into the veins. “You realise finally there’s only one way to do this thing and that’s to send it straight into your fucking heart, immediately.”

The ‘shooting galleries’

Wherever heroin is sold, Sal says, it’s used. In New York, it’s where the bureaucrats call the “core ghetto areas,” Harlem and the South Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant. Sal would go along to “shooting galleries” in Harlem. “Heroin makes you an outcast because you spend the entire time looking for it, it’s all that’s on your mind. You will not seek out anyone’s company for any reason that doesn’t have to do with this substance. So you limit yourself to running around with junkies.”

The shooting galleries are storefronts, cellars, rooftops, wherever addicts converge to shoot heroin. “In Harlem, the galleries would hold as many as 40 to 50 people at a time. The way it works is you find the shill in the street.” [Shillibeer was a German in the hearse business. The word shill has somehow come to mean go-between or side-kick.] “There’s a look about him that you recognise and a look about you that he recognises, A passer-by wouldn’t see it.

“The shill will say, ‘You lookin’? You lookin’?’ In Harlem they sell dope in quarters, but it doesn’t mean $25. I don’t know what it means, if it’s some specific weight, but a quarter in Harlem these days is $70. And they come in these big envelopes, about a headed teaspoon of white powder. White Harlem dope has a lot of quinine in it. When you inject yourself, it makes you itch. Brown Mexican dope doesn’t have so much quinine. They cut it with bonita, a horse laxative, which is very bad. It’s similar to cocaine and it jolts your fucking heart.” That’s why heroin’s called junk and that’s why many people believe that the provision of pharmaceutical, pure heroin would be a better option than methadone.

“You go into where the shill sends you. There’s a guy standing. He takes your money, disappears a moment, comes back and gives you your package. For convenience, they also sell throwaway syringes and needles. So if you want a whole set-up you tell them, ‘Set me up would ya?’ And he gives you something to cook the dope up in, a clean bottle cap with a little piece of cotton in it. You go into a room where there’s a whole bunch of mattresses or pillows. The place is dimly lit. It stinks. All over the floor are opened up and discarded envelopes, bottle caps, wads of cotton, blood on them. All around there’s cups of dirty water with blood in them that they used to clean their syringes.”

Junkies use belts as tourniquets; but as time goes on, all the available veins collapse. They start injecting all over their body: “I seen a nice-looking young girl, but she had the tombstones in her eyes, take her pants down and inject herself right here,” Sal pointed to his groin, "not two inches from her bush. I seen another guy hit himself in the vein in his neck. I seen a guy stick the needle in his cock. I seen people looking in the mirror stick it in the vein under their tongue. Most incredible sight I ever saw was a black guy who sat down in his chair like this,” he stretched out both his arms. “And he had a girlfriend on either side. Each cooked up a bottle-cap for him and each shot him up simultaneously.”

Sal was using heroin from 1968 to 1974. At the peak, for a period of 18 months, he was pumping $300 worth a day into his system. I asked him how he got hold of that kind of money and he said he hustled, dealt, conned, borrowed and never paid it back. “I went through every aunt, uncle, neighbour, friend, and I would rotate it . . . I tell you I had clothing, books, great collection of jazz records, jewellery, stereo, TV, pots and pans, candlesticks. As you begin to methodically pick your house clean, you have the entire inventory in your head: what things are worth and in what order you should get rid of them. The day comes when you put the key in the door and there’s a bare apartment and no toilet paper in the place.” When that day came, Sal went and slept in doorways.

But the day came when Sal ran out of friends and relatives and street contacts to hustle. “I was so sick, so sick. I needed that shot so bad, so bad I needed it. I just didn’t have the money and my next step was to go out and pull a gun or clock an old lady. I couldn’t do it. So I managed to scrape up $10 or $12. Now I thought of buying with that. But $10 or $12 of heroin? It wouldn’t even have relieved my nose running or my diarrhoea. After a while, $300 is just enough so you are well enough not to throw up.”

At a methadone clinic Sal scored a bottle of methadone off someone he knew. “I said to myself, you’re a slave and the meth is worse because you’re putting yourself in the hands of the establishment.

“I said man, you’re fucked. I drank this 80 milligrams of meth and since that day 1 have not shot dope, bought dope, looked at it, sniffed at it. I have nothing to do with meth, opiates, any. of that shit.” He recited that piece with the force of a man who still needs an iron will to stay away from powder and needles.

Sal has endured the withdrawal tortures, the sweating, the sickness, the aching, the convulsions, and pulled through. People I talked with later, on the methadone programme, used words like “miraculous” and ‘unbelievable” when I told them how Sal kicked the habit. Only rarely do they meet anyone who’d gone into sudden “cold turkey” withdrawal and made it.

I went down to City Hall to meet two of those running New York City’s shrinking methadone programme, the administrator, Sylvia Bascall, and, the director of training, Nick Titakis. The programme was set up in 1970 with a budget of $12 million a year to deal with the growing number of heroin addicts (no one knew exactly how many there were in the city; estimates ranged from 150,000 to 500,000) and the street crimes committed to pay for the habit, before cutbacks, there were 39 clinics in the city. Now there are 31, supplying methadone to 10,000 ex-junkies. Two other programmes in the city have 20,000 patients.

Officially, there are 30,000 methadone drinkers in New York. In fact, there are more than that: it’s common for patients to get a bit of extra pocket money by dealing it in the street.

The crime rate of those joining the clinics drops by approximately 80 or 90 per cent after the addicts have been on methadone for six months. “They don’t have to pay for their own drug, that’s where it’s at,” said Nick Titakis. “We take people off the street, put their lives together.”

Once junkies are on methadone, not heroin, they receive no euphoric effect when they use the latter. So after a while most give up trying. The difference between heroin and methadone, a synthetic opiate, is that heroin’s “action cycle” is four to six hours, while methadone’s is 24 to 36 hours.

Similarly, during withdrawal, the pain lasts longer with methadone. “In sudden, cold turkey withdrawal,” said Nick, “the symptoms from heroin are more severe but shorter in duration. On heroin you can get the pains of death for two, three, four days. With methadone, it’s a slower pain over two, three, four weeks.”

But what research has been done into the long-term side effects of methadone? “The Food and Drug Administration found no significant long-range side effects. Opiates as a class, if you don’t kill yourself with them, are probably the safest drugs there are,” was Nick’s reply. “You can’t overdose on methadone,” said Sylvia.

Heroin is a big problem wherever it is sold and used. The question remains: how much less of a problem is methadone? The citizens of a city queue up each morning to receive a swig of a lime-green fluid, without which they can’t function. So I went down to a methadone clinic on the Lower East Side to see what they are like.

The restaurateurs in Chinatown were dumping black plastic bagfuls of last night’s leftovers on the street as I walked down East Broadway towards the Lower East Side Service Centre. This is how the methadone clinic euphemistically describes itself, in white paint, on the first floor of one of those five storey buildings which have iron fire escapes zig-zagging down the back.

On the fourth floor of the Service Centre is a room that’s called the Chinese Lounge. It looks like an opium den, except that the old Chinese men who frequent it have been weaned off opium and on to methadone. Outsiders in their own community because of their drug use, these men can meet in the lounge to make lunch, chat, smoke cigarettes.

“They’re all very lonely sad people,” said ° Rebecca Sanger, who wants to be a dancer, but at the moment still works as Outreach Coordinator (“reaching out” to the community) in the clinic. “They left behind families in China when they came over in the 1920s and 1930s and haven’t been able to establish lives here because of their drug habit.” Every day they sit around in the lounge from 10.30 am to 4 pm.

I tried to talk to the people sitting in the red plastic chairs which line the clinic on the ground floor. But everyone was more interested in getting their drink from the black nurse in the white coat standing next to the lime-green liquid. This was bubbling in one of those glass cases self-service cafes use for orangeade and coke.

The centre, Rebecca told me, had 1,000 patients and comprised two methadone maintenance clinics (the other one was just down the street), a mental health clinic and a residential methadone-to-abstinence building where people live 24 hours a day for a year and a half to try and get detoxicated. For those who stay in residence, the success, rate is very high, but many leave. All the counsellors on the residential programme and about half in the clinics are ex-heroin and/or methadone addicts.

Rebecca does not love the methadone clinic. She thinks the mental health clinic, to which addicts are referred, is doing very useful work and she has particular respect for the residential centre which she sees as “really positive,” freeing people from their enslavement to drugs. But she has become disillusioned with that solution which, for her, is no solution, methadone; “Some people have been coming here for years . . . methadone slowly destroys you."

Meanwhile, the methadone addicts will continue drinking the lime-green liquid until they either die or try and kick the habit.

My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell (Vintage Books 1938)

Except for a period in 1931 when I got sick of the whole business and went to sea, working on a freighter which carried heavy machinery to Leningrad and brought Soviet pulp logs back, I have been for the last eight years a reporter on newspapers in New York City. In the summer after I left the University of North Carolina in 1929 I had an appendix operation and while getting over it I read James Bryce’s “American Commonwealth,” a book which made me want to become a political reporter. I came to New York City with that idea in mind. The first story I remember covering was a Jack the Ripper murder in a Brooklyn apartment house; an old woman had been strangled with a silk stocking and cut to death in her bedroom, the walls of which were virtually covered with large, lascivious photographs.

I was a “district man” at night for The Herald Tribune. I sat in an easy chair which had fleas in it in an old tenement across the street from Police Headquarters in Brooklyn hour after hour, waiting for something violent to happen. All the newspapers had offices in the tenement. When something happened the man on the desk at Headquarters would let us know and we would leave our tenement offices and hurry to the scene of the murder, or stick-up, or wreck, or brawl, or fire, or whatever. Then we would telephone the news in to a rewrite man. I covered districts for about four months. I covered Brooklyn, the West Side of Manhattan, and Harlem. I liked Harlem best.

In Harlem the reporters had a shack—the district man calls his office “the shack”—on the ground floor of the Hotel Theresa, the biggest hotel in Harlem, and we used to sit in the doorway in swivel chairs and look out at the people passing to and fro on Seventh Avenue, Harlem’s main street. There were four reporters in Harlem at night, three from the morning papers and one from the City News Association. My colleagues were veterans. The thing they disliked most in a reporter was enthusiasm, and I was always excited. When I got on the telephone to give my office a story—in the booth I used to try to balance the telephone receiver on my left shoulder the way they did, but I never succeeded—they would stand outside and point at their foreheads and make circles in the air, indicating that I did not have any sense. We would take turns making the rounds of the police stations. On the rounds we would sometimes drop into a speakeasy or a night club or a gambling flat and try to pull a story out of it. I got to know a few underworld figures and I used to like to listen to them talk.

Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists (2018)

 

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good: Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm by Josh Levine (ECW Press 2010)

 

An Unfunny Kid

“I never thought I would be involved in anything successful,” Larry David once said. “My plan was to try and get by. Maybe at some point I’d get involved in a bank robbery or something.”

Born on July 2, 1947, he was the second son of Morty David, a Brooklyn clothier who would later retire and become president of his condo association, like Jerry’s dad on Seinfeld. Larry’s mother went to work for the Bureau of Child Guidance. Later she wanted Larry to take the civil service test, figuring that he better get himself a secure job — postal worker, teacher — with good benefits. (On Seinfeld, when George moves back into his parents’ house, his mother has the same idea.) His parents were both Democrats, sharing their values and eventually turning Larry into one too.

Larry shared a room with his older brother, Ken, who would later move to Oregon and give advice on computers and investments. Larry went to P.S. 52 and then Sheepshead Bay High School where his report card was filled with average marks because he didn’t much care. (Later an obnoxious comic in a Seinfeld episode would come from Sheepshead Bay. “We were right on the water. The whole atmosphere stank of fish.”) There was always a lot of yelling — between his aunts and uncles, the families of his friends, and in the apartments next to their own. In just the same way, yelling would be a major form of communication on Curb. Larry liked sports and was considered a good athlete by other kids. His parents also forced him to go to Hebrew school, which he detested. He didn’t much hide his feelings and got kicked out for laughing at the rabbi who was telling him off for some infraction. (Even now, when someone is yelling at Larry on Curb he can barely keep himself from laughing.) But his parents, horrified that he wouldn’t be able to have a bar mitzvah, talked him back in.

“We’re both from kind of middle-earth Brooklyn,” said Larry Charles, who would become a producer, writer, and director on both Seinfeld and Curb. “You know, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, lower middle class, under the train tracks. We both understand that sort of Lord of the Flies sensibility that requires you to be very aware as you grow up. It’s a very savage environment, in a lot of ways a very cruel and sadistic environment.”

He was never known as funny, not by his family and not by his friends. But he liked to laugh, and he was a fan of Abbott and Costello, Bob and Ray, and especially the Jewish comic actor Phil Silvers.

The Next 30 Day Song Challenge - day 10

Day 10 - A song that's good to exercise to

Mmm, exercise? Wrong blogger.

However, I have been known to tap a toe to Moby and Debbie Harry's 'New York, New York'. Dance it out:

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories by Katha Pollitt (Random House 2007)

I should say that it was only for me that Marxism seemed over. Surely, I would tell G. at least once a week, it had to count for something that every single self-described Marxist state had turned into an economically backward dictatorship. Irrelevant, he would reply. The real Marxists weren't the Leninists and Stalinist and Maoists - or the Trotskyists either, those bloodthirsty romantics - but libertarian anarchist-socialists, people like Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, scholarly believers in true workers' control who had labored in obscurity for most of the twentieth century, enjoyed a late-afternoon moment in the sun after 1968 when they were discovered by the New Left, and had now once again fallen back into the shadows of history, existing mostly as tiny stars in the vast night of the Internet, archived on blogs with names like Diary of a Council Communist and Break Their Haughty Power. They were all men. The group itself was mostly men.

This was, as Marxists used to say, no accident. There was something about Marxist theory that just did not appeal to women. G. and I spent a lot of time discussing the possible means for this. Was it just that women don't allow themselves to engage in abstract speculation, as he thought? That Marxism is incompatible with feminism, as I sometimes suspected? Or perhaps the problem was not Marxism but Marxists: in its heyday men had kept a lock on it as they did on everything they considered important; now, in its decline, Marxism had become one of those obsessive lonely-guy hobbies, like collecting stamps or 78s. Maybe, like collecting, it was related , through subterranean psychological pathways, to sexual perversions, most of which seemed to be male as well. You never hear about a female foot fetishist, or a woman like the high-school history teacher of a friend of mine who kept dated bottles of his own urine on a closet shelf.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (Vintage Contemporaries 2008)

We traveled the length of Coney Island Avenue, that low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto-body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistan-run lumberyard. This miscellany was initially undetectable by me. It was Chuck, over the course of subsequent instructional drives, who pointed everything out to me and made me see something of the real Brooklyn, as he called it.

The FFS Train

"USA! USA! . . . ‎Anybody give a shit?"

*silence*

Hilarious.

'Idiot with a Tripod' in Astoria, Queens

A fresh blanket of snow in New York overnight allows me to right a blogging wrong by posting this wonderful short film by the filmmaker Jaime Stuart on the blog.

'Man in a Blizzard' was filmed and edited in the space of few hours this past boxing day when New York got hit with that blizzard which resulted in Bloomberg's approval ratings taking a skid and, at one point, thirteen vehicles being abandoned in the road outside our apartment building.

Roger Ebert thinks it should win ". . . the Academy Award for best live-action short subject". One of the funnier trolls on the internet thinks that Roger Ebert should "see more movies". I just think it's beautiful.

That music? Yeah, I thought it was Blur, too, but it turns out that it's Trent Reznor.

UPDATE

Just realised that you really don't get the full experience of the film from my embedded YouTube link. You're better off checking the video out here over at Vimeo.

Tepper Isn't Going Out by Calvin Trillin (Random House 2001)

"I wouldn't have thought you were a reader of the East Village Rag." Tepper said. "Is there something I've missed about you all these years?"
My niece sent it to me," Gordon said. "She lives on Rivington Street. I don't know if that's included in what they call the East Village. We still call it the Lower East Side. You don't even want to know what she paid for the apartment. A co-op. A co-op on Rivington Street! I told her that her great-grandparents worked sixteen hours a day just to get out of Rivington Street. What was cooperative about those buildings when they lived in them was the bathroom. Now whatever miserable cold-water flat my grandparents lived in has probably been made into a co-op. For all we know, that may be her co-op. She may be paying thousands to live in the place her great-grandparents worked themselves to death so their children wouldn't have to live in. What a city."

2 minutes 38 seconds in

Woody Allen will be using that line in his next film.