BALLS...life's secret scenarios #3 "Going Back to Brooklyn & Fritz"

Balls, hubris, chutzpah, self-aggrandizing to a fault, with a sarcastic stream of consciousness and an elephantine set of cahones; little else would set Fritz Dubake apart from other off-beat New York Jewish Hipsters. Dubake, a seedling red diaper baby in 1940’s Brooklyn, spent the next major portion of his life living in Manhattan with his wife and kids always insistently trying to find success, make it happen for himself and family. I’m sure still feels he won’t—as an actor, a Broadway Off-Broadway theatre director, a filmmaker, writer, jazz musician-singer, communist, waiter, fish cook (which I have to admit he’s really good at), cab driver (of course) and—for the most part a legend in his own opinion—one of the world’s truly hot lovers, a major cocksman in his lechery of young beautiful women, mostly actresses. Perhaps by the numbers of conquests alone, one could grudgingly allow him that one.


I’ve known him for close to sixty-five years now and, remarkably, to this day—he’s a year younger to my seventy-nine—he’s been my best good friend for all of our history and time on earth together. A couple of scrapes now and again, a good part of that time in different parts of the world, but we have always stayed in close touch with each other. And, as a matter of fact, actually, we are as close now on the brink of full-fledged ‘altacockerhood,’ as we were inseparable as fun-loving, smutty-minded, 12 year-old Jewboys when we met in our first year of junior high school---JHS 128 in Bath Beach-Bensonhurst in the Gravesend Bay section of Brooklyn US of A.


The neighborhood predominantly housed lower-middle-class Italian families and, in the mix, a smattering of close-knit extended Jewish families from Eastern Europe mostly. The Jews, somewhat better-off than the Italians, but both were striving working-class folks in a mutual quest out to the clean air of the 5 boroughs from the hovels of the Lower East Side tenements of immigrants in Manhattan.


In our Bath Beach neighborhood, Jewish kids were viscerally afraid of the Italian kids. Why? Because they would beat us up all the time; chase us home from school and if you were caught in a dead heat running for home, surrounded by them, their fists hungry to punch you in the stomach and face after the inevitable taunts from the tougher, stupider ones: “Hey Judaatzebestia; hey Jew bastid, where ya tink ya goin’?”


I must say though, Dubake had a talent for making friends with the dumb ass goombahs, could make them laugh with his ludicrous Jewish accents, jokes and funny pop singer imitations; would even join them on their Woolworth nickel and dime shoplifting runs, pocketing small lead toy soldiers, chocolate bars and chewing gum. Fritz always knew where his bread was buttered on that score and on how to avoid the inevitable beating. I was wirier, scrappier, smaller than my buddy ‘Da Bake’—or ‘Slink’ as he was called by the ‘ginnies’—essentially Fritz was a bit of a physical coward. He used his sharp wit, humor, and guile to cool down bad street encounters. My tendency was to flail into it, get the shit kicked out of me most of the time. Oh, he’d hold my coat, make the ground rules for a fair one-on-one, then watch me get it! One thing he never did, though, was haul ass. if pressed he could fight vengefully with an intent to kill.


I remember once, we were schmoozing with some of the girls and got caught out late goofing off in the Bensonhurst Park. It was a cold winter afternoon.  We were chased and set upon by this gang of young wop toughs. . .we were really getting badly taunted, and then mauled by six or seven of these older stronger teen age boys we had never seen in the neighborhood before. It looked like they really were going to do us in, force us to the ground, kick our respective Jewish asses and prettier faces. Fritz jumped up, reached into his pocket and opened a small penknife, and without much further ado, stuck one of the kids in the back through his winter coat. . .the kid screamed and began to cry "I'm stabbed." They all ran one way hovering, helping, the wounded crying boy; Fritz and I hauled out fast in the other direction. . .we never told anyone about it to this day.