Alfie and The Big Brooklyn Bagel Blow-Out

Available next month from LAACO Publishing
in paperback size....

Brooklyn's penultimate tale that will have on the seat of your pants and laughing all the way...from Coney Island to the Brooklyn Bridge...

Les Aaron

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Chapter I: Alfie Buys It Big Time....

It was sort of like that.
Who would have believed it?...
But they yanked it out of his throat, Pudgy said. A big doughy mass. Big Alfie, the terror of Bklyn. Croaked on a bagel and not even a schmeer in sight.
Was that justice or what?

They said that they found him down by the Cadman Street exit off the bridge. Not any bridge you understand, “the Bridge!” You know the one I’m talking about...the one that goes to Brooklyn-- the one that proved to all the “naysayers” that strands of wire, tightly woven and formed into cables could support just about anything --even Aunt Lee with her stiff corsets and all the gold she brought over from the old country -- the Bridge that brought two cities together to form the biggest city in the world....the one that city slickers thought they could sell to the out-of-town rubes and oftentimes did. The icon that stands for the place in most people’s minds...

Look! Lots of people talk about it; but nobody understands it.. Most have it all have it wrong. Brooklyn is literally beyond comprehension. Even though it’s bigger than most places, including it’s neighbor Manhattan… even though its real population is more than 4 million people (nobody knows the real population)...even though its made up of some ninety ethnic groups....and its immigrants come from every place in the world every year to get lost in the countless ethnic barrios that crisscross its geography like so many veins and arteries and swell its ranks till it almost implodes, it is still the ultimately unknowable place.

.But, of course, the die-hards will tell that Brooklyn’s not what it was...now that the Dodgers are dodging palm trees instead of trolley cars....and Ebbets Field has transmogrified from a ball park into a housing project....and George Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park is no longer where you can ride a metal horse , tumble down onto a spinning turntable, get your skirt blown over your head and even get poked by midget clown with a cattle prod. No, we have been spared all of that. Now that the Brooklyn Eagle--the paper that was prescient enough to fight the union between Brooklyn and the city across the river-- has been reduced to a Brooklyn pigeon...and the downtown Brooklyn Paramount-- where if Rock and Roll was not born it was nurtured-- is busy saving souls...and nothing else is what it was except for a few aging Brooklyn Polar Bears who still jump into the waters off Coney every January to prove that they are alive despite the fact that most of their kids have written them off as being hopeless romantics.

...Nevertheless, the endless boardwalk of dreams is still there,... the elevated line still deposits you on Stillwell,...the crunchy, crispy, juicy original Nathan Handwerker hot dogs across the street still beckon….Prospect park is still playing host to lovers even though they may whisper sweet nothings to each other in recondite languages ....... the Gowanis ,with its enduring stench, is still the unofficial cemetery for half of Brooklyn’s mobsters,... the tawdry VFW hall is still there, the one that straddles the site where a few hearty Marylanders forfeited their lives so that our country’s leader could escape to fight another day and, in the process, create a county the likes of which the world has never seen. And the Heights’ promenade, if anything, has the one thing that Manhattan does not, unparalleled views of a city without parallel, an ever-changing montage of buildings, harbor and a skyline that stretches to infinity with its vertical twinkling lights that make heaven and earth look the same,.... And the famous and not so famous are still being interred in Brooklyn’s own Greenwood cemetery in condo-like mausoleums festooned with everything except the ubiquitous TV antenna (we are assured that that will not be long in coming) ... the no longer cobblestoned streets of downtown Brooklyn still exist in their myriad permutations, although today the trolley cars that earned the Dodgers their name are missing; nevertheless, they masses yearning to be free still come in record numbers speaking every language and dialect known to man,...and Bay Ridge is still fundamentally alive and hopping with its scores of gaily festooned Irish bars serving its myriad brews distilled from oats and grain and even rice until the last standing Irishman falls off his stool and calls it quits...and South Brooklyn is still as colorful as ever with its scores of Italian clubs where grown men sit around all day and gossip or play bocce at the local park....and there are still hundreds, maybe thousands of little restaurants that now cater to the invading Yuppies from “the City” and points west --except now they serve up a world stew of sushi, empanadas, grits and greens, mulligan stew, Norwegian meatballs, kasha, blintzes, won tons, crepes, bracciola, sui mei, mei fun, noodles a thousand different ways, borscht, hibachi steak, angel hair pasta, Lebanese pizza, burritos, gnocchi….and who knows how many other concoctions too wild too imagine--and make no mistake about it, Brooklyn is still home to more churches than anywhere else....only, today, some of them have been transmuted into condos, or offices, or play centers for urban kids. That’s the Brooklyn of today....the Brooklyn of lawyers, judges, artists, accountants, carpenters, retailers, techies, and even the Big Alfies of the world -- the bedroom community for countless wealthy New Yorkers and working class strivers and the misfits who don’t fit in anywhere else and the immigrants of every nation on earth making it one of the most colorful landscapes in America. But that’s a whole other issue and not why we’re here today.