Yes, the title of this post is correct, our never honestly elected "president" said it in Africa when asked by a reporter if the Iraq War was the cause of the US economy tanking. Bush looked unprepared as hell and he did one of his chuckles, looked as dumb as he is, and then he blurted out, "Actually the War in Iraq is good for the US economy. It provides a lot of jobs (chuckle, chuckle)...I mean, we need materials over there, so it is actually good for the economy." I paraphrase because I'm too elevated to think at the level of his near-idiocy way of thinking of this fool--I used to think a little like him when I was a dumbass preteener at about the level of this Bad Boy's intelligence on high flame--but that's more or less exactly what our quack president said. And then across the aisle of the media worship of Bush channels there popped up old Pappy Bush, the Big Daddy himself, and he was backing the Mad Cap'n, John "100 Years War" McCain, and looking pretty damn good for a man hittin' 90 soon--does being privileged and rich give you good health? Coincidentally, Pappy was a plane jockey, too, a Cap'n, too, in WWII--Pappy bailed out of his crashed plane before all of his men got out--sounds like he and Cap'n John were the same kind of pilots--crashing the planes more than they were flying them. And speaking of the privileged rich keeping healthy into ancient years, check out Warren Buffett--he looks healthy as a horse--though it is embarrassing to see his goofy daughter who he's cut out of his will living on $17,000 a year--that's right; the world's filthiest rich man still thinks like the white trash he is when it comes to punishing his rebellious daughter--Warren and Billy Boy Gates and Melinda "Lucky Bitch" Gates pooled their wealth, remember, to become the three richest human beings in history--think of that! These 3 goofball ordinaries combined are worth way over 60 billion bucks. And asshole Buffett allows his daughter to live in the white trash world where Warren really belongs--his father was an old political crook! These rich bastards don't get rich on their own; it's always something to do with family ties--as in the Walton Family (white trash Arkie hillbillies); as in where the Donald got his wealth; as in Bill Gates stealing DOS from a small Seattle firm--or being crooked as a snake at night.
Buy those war stocks, folks; we keep telling you here at The Daily Growler to keep on hustlin' those war stocks--buy 'em on margin like the big boys do--or hell, form a private investment group like Mitt Romney did when he was guv'nor of Massachusetts. Exxon-Mobil just turned in the largest profits ever in the history of Capitalism--and you weren't along for the ride. Hillary was. Obama was. Slick Willie was. Mitt "the Mormon" Romney was. Pappy Bush and Prince Bandar Bush were. Hell, even old Mammy Babs was along for the ride. Hell, even Neil and Marvin are doin' OK in the Dubai Stock Market these days. Ain't life grand?
Castro
I must confess that when I was in college back in 1957 my roommate and I actually sent letters to Herbert Matthews of the NYTimes wanting information from him on how we could go to Cuba and fight with Fidel. I had loved Cuba since the days of my one-eyed uncle who at one time was a merchant seaman out of New Orleans and he would sit and sip his sippin' whiskey and tell stories of his days sailin' across the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Habana; how wild the city was; and sometimes he'd start telling Habana stories and I'd have to leave the room--"these stories aren't for a little boy's ears," I was told by the grown ups. So I would run off as if to bed and then sneak back close enough to the room where they were to try and half-ass catch the rest of the stories. Of course the stories I was not supposed to hear were the ones about prostitutes and a black Cuban who it was said had the world's largest penis and underage girls and gambling and the Mafia, especially the Mafia--and my uncle proved to me one time to be "friends" with the biggest mobster in Galveston, Texas--my uncle took me with him to Galveston one bright Sunday and we went to this mobster's seafood restaurant and I had oysters for the first time in my life and fried shrimp and gumbo--whoooo boy, what a pleasure--and the mob head of Galveston came to our table and he and my uncle embraced and, WOW, I was wide-eyed, they kissed each other! "That's Eye-tal-yun," my uncle said when I told him my dad said men didn't kiss, "besides, that wasn't the kind of kissing your dad was talking about. Frenchmen kiss each other this way, too; and Rush-un men, they kiss each other like that, too." "Looks nasty to me." "I'd rather this man be kissing me than wacking me." He laughed. I didn't know what he meant.
My roommate and I never got an answer back from Matthews (he was the reporter who went into the Cuban mountains above Habana and met and interviewed Fidel and Che--and reported that there were American dudes with them--so that's why we wrote Herbert Matthews, you see. Later, we wrote Errol Flynn when we saw Errol on the Tonight Show (Jack Paar was the host then) and he'd just come back from Cuba and he was at his flamboyant best, wearing a cape and carrying a cockatoo, I kid you not, and a cane, and he claimed he'd been injured--shot--while with Fidel and Che as they entered Habana in their glorious victory over a true scumbag of a prick, Batista. I remember when Fidel took over Batista's presidential office how he found tons of cigars and gold coins and expensive liquors and rums and of course pornography. Errol sent us a stupid fan letter and an 8 x 10 glossy which we hung on our room wall right under our huge photo of Fidel.
Fidel seemed right to us college nonconformists in those days, the days right before the New Frontier began--and then after I was in the US Army, they sent my ass down into the rivery swamps along the Red River just north of Alexandria, Louisiana, and we were reopening Fort Polk down there, a huge army training base in WWII--and we were reopening it because after it looked like we might go to war with the Soviet Union over Cuba--the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK had called up a bunch of National Guards around the country for a one-year stretch and they needed Fort Polk cleaned up to house a big bunch of Guardsmen coming from Texas and Oklahoma. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been a weird affair. Krushchev sent what the lying-ass State Department said were ICBM missiles to Cuba--why the US had spy-plane photos that showed what were definitely ships and they were loaded with what the gov said were missiles--long tubular-looking things but covered with white sheet-like tarps so you couldn't really say they were missiles and especially you couldn't say they had warheads on them--and then they showed some sky-high photos of the Cuban mainland and they said these photos proved that missile silos were being built on the Cuban mainland, though the photos were as grainy as a Bin Laden video tape and you couldn't really be sure they were really missile silos. Seeing Colon's Pal lying like a dog and showing his WMD evidence in front of the UN reminded me of those rather unsubstantial proofs of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Remember, we had Guantanamo Bay Navy Base in Cuba then, but no, Kennedy, through the insistence of the Cuba mobsters who had fled to the US--especially to Miami and Union City, New Jersey, and New Orleans, gave his approval for the disastrous Bay of Pigs attack--and what a jerk-off, numbskull attack it was, too. It could have started WWIII and would have meant we might have really had missiles fired at New York City from Cuba--but it proved to be a big SCARY bunch of political bluffing--and in the end, JFK got his head blown to bits over it--I think--because of the Bay of Pigs and his Mafia friends depending on him to help them get Cuba back under the cover of his brother as Attorney General pretending to be coming down hard on the mob while at the same time he, JFK, was screwin' Judith Exeter (sic) in Chicago and she was Sam Giancondo's main fuck--though who knows, Sam might have given Judith to JFK--and everybody back then knew Kennedy had won the '60 election against Tricky Dick "I Am Not a Crook" Nixon by a public hair's margin--it was an extremely close election--and the dead came out in droves in the Chicago Democratic wards to vote for the Boston bootlegger's son--Dick Daley the mayor carrying the big prick of influence in that todd'lin' town, though the Mafia was still running Chicago, just like the Mafia kept control here in New York City, noticeably of the beer and liquor distribution, milk distribution, building materials and concrete distribution, the private garbage collection contracts, the hotel workers and all the provisions for the casinos in Atlantic City--Ballys was originally a gaming company out of Chicago--they made one-armed bandits as well as pinball machines--the Jersey mob, everybody knows, gave us Old Blue Eyes and Anthony Benedetto, who the mob called simply Tony Bennett--I mean, come on, Peter Lawford a member of the Rat Pack was married to JFK's sister--and these two sex maniacs didn't know who the Mafia was--I mean, Vegas and Reno were both started by mobsters--Frankie owned the Cal-Neva Lodge in Reno at one time--he owned it as a front for the mob, I should say. When Steve Wynne first got started legitimately in Atlantic City--Steve's dad had been a floating card and craps game provider in the Eastern Pennsylvania, coal mine area before Steve took over his dad's business and took it high end. Remember how Frankie would always show up at Steve's first AC venture--the Sands was it?--and Frankie would act like he owned the joint and Steve Wynne was his dickboy. And oh boy was Old Blue Eyes involved with Kennedy politics. You know Frankie know Joe Kennedy the Boston bootlegger who went Hollywood to legitimize all the illegal bucks he'd made bootlegging during the stupid, nutjob-Christian-prudes-imposed days of Prohibition (read: Protestant). So you just gotta believe....
I was in Dallas when the assassination occurred. We were sure it was the right-wing oilmen who had wacked JFK--especially H.L. Hunt (I notice in the news today, that they're saying Bush is not putting up his 20-foot-high stainless steel border fence to keep the Messkins from swimmin' the Rio Grande across the riverfront acreage of Ray Hunt, a close friend of our quack president--and by golly, the son of one of H.L.'s sons) who ran radio broadcasts defaming the Kennedys and Catholics and Socialists and Communists and Secular Humanists (people who care for their fellowman--a big NO-NO with Conservatives--the "pull yourself up by your bootstrap" philosophy that comes out of monarchical England--but then, I mean, we got to noticing the many connections to the Mafia that suddenly popped up in the Kennedy Assassination rumors, a lot of Mafia connections, among them, Jack Ruby.
Everybody who lived in Dallas, Texas, in the 1963 and who enjoyed Dallas's multivibrant nightlife knew Jack Ruby.
When I got my first job in Dallas as a young man just out of the army, weighing 155, with sunbaked cotton blond hair, toned nicely like an antelope, and very aware of how many loose women married or single there were in the Dallas social whirl for a swinging single young dude like me (my first girlfriend in Dallas gave me her MG 1600A to drive and when she broke up with me, I bought a Coupe de Ville Cadillac, a fairly "new" one, two-tone baby blue outside and all baby blue interior, a make out car if a young stud ever had one and I immediately got to hanging with the party-hearty crowd and we literally partied most every night, some kind of party, except Sunday nights--on Sundays we rested up and then on Monday mornings we went to work sober and got a week's work done then hit the bars after work to begin another party week, Tuesday night being the first night of the planned parties, and I was invited to more parties than I had time to go to.
My crowd had already established a pattern on New Year's Eve of booking a big table at the biggest Dallas strip club, Abe's Colony Club, over off Commerce Street--and they'd book a table right up next to the stage--and my first New Year's Eve with this gang was at the Colony Club and it was one hell of a night--the champagne flowed like water and the bottles of bourbon and CC and vodka were in the paper bags--you couldn't serve mixed drinks in Texas back then--you brought your bottle into the club and they sold you ice and mixes and lemons and shit--set ups they were called--so there was excess drinking done by all. I ended up with about three women, one my best friend's wife, kissing and feeling them up and sloppily propositioning them all and them being so drunk on champagne they were like putty in my hands--it was a night I'll never forget. But the next year, the party boss of my gang, my best friend, announced we were booking a table in a new club for Jan '63--the Carousel Club, a strip club we knew was opened by Jack Ruby and his sister to compete with the Colony Club, which was only a block away from the Carousel. As a result of a whale of a night that New Year's Eve, any time a buddy of mine came to town and wanted some action, I'd take him to the Carousel Club. One night my old college roommate--the guy who was going to Cuba with me to fight with Fidel--showed up unexpectedly at my parlor door. He was living in Houston by then where he'd become a head high school football coach and was fixing to get married so he'd come up to his hometown outside of Dallas to get some papers or something and then he just decided to drop over by my place for a visit--actually, he was looking for one last fling as a bachelor--so I suggested we hit the Carousel Club and get in a little manly fun.
We got to the club and were seated at a table by a chick waitress and we started drinking--we drank Michelob on draft in those days--big frosty 16 oz mugs of cold Michelob into which we'd pour a can of tomato juice--that was my signature way of drinking my beers and my old roomy had taken it up to from being along drinking with me--or I'd put a can of Snappy Tom in my beer, which did make the beer even snappier and easy to swig. I'd gotten the idea of putting tomato juice in my beers one summer while visiting Leadville, Colorado, with my dad who'd at one time in his youth worked as a powder monkey in the big Climax Mine up above Leadville and we spent most of our summer vacations when I was a teener in Colorado, and my dad took me one day up to the Climax mine and then down into Leadville to a big beer hall and he ordered a Bloody George and ordered me a glass of tomato juice--which I loved as a kid--I've always had a thing for tomatoes--and when the beer came, dad said that's how the miners in those parts drank their beer--at least that's what my dad said. My dad said, too, it kept them from having to piss so much--the tomato juice weighted the beer down see--plus you got the nutrition of the tomato juice, too--so anyway, that's how I got to drinking beers when I got on my own and started seriously drinking in the Fort Worth and Dallas beer joints and night clubs.
So my old college roomy and I are in the Carousel and Chris Colt and her 45s comes out and she jiggles her nice ones, they had to wear pasties in those days, but they were allowed to let them bounce all over the place--to see their breasts naked or to to have them show you their pussies you had to make a special appointment with them--send them a note with the request and wrap it around a twenty smacker note and they'd invite you backstage into their private dressing rooms and give you a private showing--all naked, with a spread-eagle finale, topped off by her holding it open for a few seconds, then like at the psychiatrist's, time was up and out you'd go--and the thrill was gone. One old letch told me one night they'd fuck you back there for a thousand dollars.
After Chris Colt left the stage, a comic came out and started whooping it up with shit like "Hold on to your arses, boys, we got gals of all styles for you comin' up--why we've got jigglers...er, I mean jugglers...[he paused for laughter but there was none]...wow, you guys remind me of my woman. I called her up the other night and said, 'Sweet baby, could I bring my laundry over to your place and use your washing machine tonight, please?' [he paused again for a reaction--he got none]...and my baby said, 'Sure, bring it on, but you know, my washing machine is notorious for handling only big loads...' [he again paused for laughter and again got none]...so anyway, I go over and I use her washing machine and she washes my laundry up real wet and then she slams it hard in her dryer and ohhhh...[again no laughter]...so anyway, I go back home completely satisfied and with the cleanest laundry in Big D--even my shorts were spotless [no laughter]. So anyway, a couple'a days later I was layin' around the house, you know, getting a little, shall we say, randy! [oooooh--nope, nothing] So I call up my baby and I say, 'Honey chile, you know, I sure could use your washing machine again tonight--I got a load of laundry here...' and this bitch interrupted me and she said, 'Turkey, if you don't have a bigger load than you had the other night, you better stay...." My roommate and I couldn't resist, we stood up and said in unison..."You better stay home and do it by hand."
The comic tried to come back at us and started throwing insults at us, but we were invincible, plus we were getting soused as hell, loose, full of bravado. It got so bad, the comic finally hollered for the management, "Throw these clowns out'a here, Mr. Ruby."
Yep. You guessed it. Jack Ruby himself came over and politely said, "Guys, you're fucking up the show--and you're killin' my comic, guys." He took us back to the coat room area. "Boys, I like you guys..." We told him we were in the military; on leave; that tugged at Jack's heartstrings. "Tell you what guys, I'm calling my sister over at the Vegas Club, you know the Vegas?...." "On Lemon, right?" "Yeah, I'm calling my sister and here, boys, take these...." He handed us both a business card. On it it said "Free Drinks at the Vegas Club Courtesy of Jack Ruby." We were still drunk but we got real sappy with Jack. "Damn, Mr. Ruby, you're the greatest. Our asshole buddy, you are, Mr. Ruby." "Call me Jack, boys." "Damn right, Jack." "OK, boys, I'm callin' my sister now--so you guys, have a ball over there--you can get as wild as you like over there."
And we did go to Vegas Club that night, but I didn't use my free drink card; I kept mine, put it in my billfold. It stayed in my billfold until the '80s when a woman I thought hung the moon hung my balls out to dry on a back-forty fencepost, kicking my ass out of her life on a cold-ass night in February, and later telling me all my possessions I'd left in her garage had gotten ruined when the garage flooded and she'd had her Italian yard man take it all to the Westchester County, New York, dump.
I had a bib in those memories that had been kissed leaving a big red lip imprint and then signed by my favorite stripper, Toni Turner--left over from my first Colony Club New Year's Eves who had then moved over to the Carousel the next year. I was so crazy about Toni, I managed through a lawyer friend of hers to eventually meet her. I became connected with this lawyer when he was handling an overage girl from Montana the Dallas cops had picked up and thrown in the Dallas juvenile home, of which I was the office manager and making decisions over whether we would take these kids from the cops or not. I liked this big beauty of a Montana teenager, she was 18, and when she was checkin' out with this lawyer, I gave her my phone number and told her to call me and she did, she called me one night and we talked and flirted over an hour and finally I talked her into going out with me and when I went to pick her up, damn if she wasn't staying with this lawyer. He took me off to the side, like her dad, I laughingly thought, and asked me if I'd ever been "rimmed." Whoaaaa. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, though he soon solved that problem, telling me rimming meant that this young girl was an expert at tonguing assholes--ooooh, doesn't that sound so "filthy"?--but like I've said before, isn't any GOOD sex nasty according to hypocrite white morals?
That lawyer turned out to be one of Jack Ruby's personal lawyers--and this dude lived in the same apartment complex with most of the Dallas strippers including Toni Turner, who this guy took me out to the complex swimming pool to meet and there she was, Toni Turner, and wearing a bikini. She claimed she remembered me from the Colony Club--"I let you kiss my nipple"--by golly she was right--she did remember me. I sat around jiving with Toni, checking out her amazing body--I had a beer with her and then she said she had to go and she let me kiss her on the lips and wow, I was still such a dumbcluck of a wobbly kid; things like that turned me on. Later the lawyer said, "You know all these strippers are Lesbians, including Toni?"
We all knew Jack Ruby was from Chicago. We all knew, too, you didn't open a strip club in Dallas, Texas, in them thar days without mob approval--and it was the Chicago mob that was running the show in Dallas then. Later a friend I'd gone to grade school with showed up in my apartment one night as Mr. So and So from Chicago and I said, "Mr So and So my ass, you're BH jr., you bastard," and sure enough, that's who it was. He was in Dallas with three railroad freight cars full of stolen mens suits out of Chicago, which he was selling off for the mob to Dallas mens clothing retailers--he brought me one--and for a while there I was running around Dallas wearing a beautiful silver sharkskin suit--a very expensive suit--and it made me look like a mobster.
After the Kennedy assassination, I moved to New Orleans where I went to work for the Orleans Parish Court system and my big boss was Jim Garrison--and soon I was in the midst of Garrison's conspiracy theories about the Kennedy Assassination and the Rush to Judgment writer (Epstein?) was there and Mort Sahl the comic was there, and Clay Shaw lived right around the corner from me--and I lived in an apartment owned by G. Brian Corporation, which I later found out was owned and controlled by Carlos Marcellos, the New Orleans mob boss who'd also been a mob boss in Habana before Castro--and I saw Carlos all the time at the Italian restaurant I frequented on Decatur in the Quarter--and guess who also used to work in Habana with these guys? Why Jack Ruby!
And then when I lived in Mexico City, there was a bar right around the corner from my hotel on Boulevard Sullivan called the Granma--and I was walking along one day with this Mexican Air Force lieutenant who was madly in love with my young, Tex-Mex-Choctaw-Welsh, ripely tanned, chiquita-looking, large bosomed wife--so much so he later flew us all over Central America and to Colombia and Venezuela and over to Trinidad and Tobago in a Mexican Air Force light cargo plane, a DC-12 prop job, but a safe plane, a beautiful plane. I told him I wanted to go in the Granma and have a drink. "That's a Cuban bar, man. Dangerous." "Dangerous?" "Yes, it's called the Granma because this is the zona where Castro and Che started the Granma movement." "Great, I love Castro, let's go." "OK, but if you order a rum and coke, you have to say, Cuba libre con Castro, por favor or they'll throw us out." We went in. It was dark, olive drab, very like the military fatigues Castro and Che and the Cuban Revolutionaries wore and like Fidel kept wearing throughout his career until his recent infirmities and now he seems to prefer some kind of running suit to his old military fatigues. And I did order a Cuba libre con Castro--and I got a whole round of great Salud! and Viva Cuba; Viva Castro! glasses raised high and clinked in unison--and for the rest of the afternoon we drank Cuba libres con Castro libre--free, baby; a true rum drunk--and I got to hangin' out at the Granma every afternoon, one time I was even made an honorary Cuban--so there.
And this is the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution--and Castro has survived in spite of how blasphemous the US has treated the Cuban people in their holdover hatred of first commies and then a fucking Cuban who dared take his country back for his people from a hated dictator in the name of Jose Marti and then kick out the big American sugar plantation companies, Imperial, Domino, yeah, they were all down there, and Castro kicked them out and socialized the sugar industry.
And then when I lived in Key West, Florida, just a few years later, I used to watch Cuban teevee rather than American teevee. There was this one Cuban news woman who was outrageously beautiful--I watched her all the time--and I listened to the music and Castro's long harranging anti-Imperialist speeches; Cuba at that time had a young jazz orchestra that became one of the top jazz bands in the world; Cuba had some of the best boxers in the world, too, and Castro, it turns out, loved American music and films--why, Cuba has one of the best film schools in the world--did'ja know that? There's a statue of John Lennon in the downtown Habana park where every year they have a huge music festival, jazz, cojuntos, rhumbas, Afro-Cuban.
I've never been to Cuba except in my uncle's tall or whatever tales of Habana and the fact over the years I've had several very good Cuban friends. In New Orleans I fell momentarily in love with a Cuban refugee girl who'd been a member of the Cuban National Ballet.
So Castro has given up his presidency. He says now he's going to be a writer. I like that.
I have good friends who are Cubans here in NYC--their parents were business people in Habana. They do hate Castro. I can't mention his name around them, especially the old Cubanos.
I used to walk past the Cuban Embassy on Lexington Avenue here in NYC every day going to work and then coming home from work, and it was always eerie going by that old vintage brick ex-mansion--it was barricaded off by a metal barricade fence and at the corner was an NYPD cop in a glass booth--and when Guiliani became mayor he renamed the side street that went by the Embassy after that crooked Miami brotherhood bunch who tried to bomb Habana and got shot down trying by the Cuban Air Force. So, yes, I know Cuban refugees all over hate Castro and have long wished him dead. How foolish. If we'd been diplomatic and caring about the Cuban people just think what could have happened--I remember when Castro said he'd rather be friends and partners with the US but if we insisted on boycotting him and treating him as an enemy he was going to the Soviet Union for help and he was declaring himself a Communist rather than the socialist he really was.
Quite a character; and look what he accomplished in spite of the US boycott. Cuba is literate now with a fine education system up through college. Cuba also has a fine health care system and some of the finest doctors in the world. Cuban engineers are whizzes, too, and have helped build infrastructures in Third World countries around the world. Cuba was building Grenada an airport to help their tourist industry when Ronnie Raygun decided Cuba was setting up a commie military base there and blew half that little island country away--killing Maurice Bishop the duly elected president of Grenada. What idiocy.
Why all these refugees could have already been going back and forth to Cuba by now--but, no, we just couldn't tolerate commies in those days and now we're just an ornery bunch of freedom-cursing hypocrites.
And today Castro retired. I lift a Cuba libre con Castro to the old revolutionary's moxie.
Salud, Fidel.
thegrowlingfidelistowolf
for The Daily Growler
In Case You Wanted to Know What Guantanamo Bay Looks Like:
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