I was surprised that Jerry even knew who Iggy Pop was, but the idea that Iggy was living in Bath Beach was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. Their name came not from the state (duh), but from Louisiana Lanes, a scrungy local bowling alley on 86th St. And then there were the Louisiana Boys, the gang Jerry belonged to, who to their credit occasionally did things other than beat people up. There were the notoriously violent Bath Beach Boys, led by the widely feared Charlie, who was shot and killed in a local bar sometime in the early ‘80s.
It was probably the toughest part of the neighborhood, with an unusually high concentration of gangs and wiseguys. Jerry was from the Bath Beach section of Bensonhurst, an almost completely Italian area in what was a predominantly Italian part of Brooklyn to begin with. It was inconceivable that the Godfather of Punk, from Detroit, would have suddenly decided to move there. I played in bands with some pretty hip local musicians, including one who regularly played on bills with various ex–New York Dolls in the East Village, and another who actually went on to play with Johnny Thunders. During a brief period in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s there were a couple of vaguely punk bars nearby, but doing anything involving music or culture usually entailed taking the subway into Manhattan, a good 45 minutes away. “Who’s that?” I didn’t know anyone named Iggy.īensonhurst is way down in southwestern Brooklyn, just outside Coney Island.
Jerry* dealt pot, among other things, in a schoolyard about half a mile away from where I lived. “Guess who I just sold a nickel to?” he asked me. It was sometime in the fall of ’82: I was talking to a friend outside my parents’ house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, when Jerry, a guy I knew from the neighborhood, walked by.
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