Runyonesque Character Left 
       Imprint on Times Square 

In a neighborhood full of colorful and zany characters William Kanafsky easily ranked at or near the top of any list. He possessed all the traits of a typical Damon Runyon character - a slick, racy, fast-talking, wisecracking wit. He packaged this with an attitude that said  "I'm going to verbally strip you down and embarrass you and have fun while you squirm."   
And he often did just that, in a tough-love way, to anyone who walked through the doors of his shop.

The final chapter of this Clinton story ended on March 11, 2001 when William Kanafsky died at St. Clare's Hospital. He was 58. He had lived and worked in Clinton and Times Square for over 25 years.

Few people knew his real name. He had more monikers than a character in a Runyon short story. Mention Wild Bill, Billy Kane, Colonel Finkelstein, White Willie, Billy Dancing Shoes, Billy Kanocker, The Bearded One, and then most everyone knew you were referring to Billy from the Manhattan Plaza Winery.

He managed the wine shop since 1985. When he first started there Clinton still had a hard edge, neighborhood in transition. Vacant stores, shoddy storefronts, dilapidated tenements, drugs, street prostitution and high crime created an unsafe feeling, especially late at night. Ninth Avenue did not enjoy the bustling restaurant and cafe buzz it has today.

Yet he took a struggling business and made it into one midtown’s best wine and spirits shop.

He saw change coming to Hell’s Kitchen. He hung out with everyone from hookers and hustlers at the Full Moon bar on Eight Avenue to the struggling actor’s, celebrities, and bankers who frequented the Film Center Café or the West Bank Cafe among a score of  local restaurants, bars and dives. He lived it up mightily and became friends with many, who in turn became his customers.

He had a knack for building a business. Prior to joining the Winery he managed Bernard's, a popular theater and late-night bistro on West 48th, a site now occupied by the Morgan Stanley building. There the clientele ranged from Broadway celebrities to professional athletes to the biggest names in porn. Of course many of the latter became “close” friends.

He chatted up actors Tony Roberts, Frank Langella, Nell Carter among others and wrestling's Andre the Giant and Greg Valentine. He honed his blatant descriptive sexual humor with the likes of Ron Jeremy, Candida Royale, Ginger Lynn and Danielle stars whose names draped the marquees of Time Square biggest porn venues.

"He was the funniest man outside of showbiz and definitely the most irreverent man I have ever known," said Jimmy Kissane, an actor who worked with him for thirteen years. "You couldn't even print his best stuff. He was a born comic. He had to get a laugh at any expense even if it made you boiling mad. You got mad but ten other people were on the floor laughing."

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami Beach, Mr. Kanafsky not only sold spirits but entertained customers with stories and one-liners usually laced with a sexual, racial and ethnic zings.

He loved talking about his "big" missed opportunity after his family returned to Brooklyn. "My mother's friend begged her to get me to take her daughter out. We went

to Erasmus Hall High School together. I couldn't be bothered. She was dumpy, fat and had a big Jewish nose, " he used to say (minus the expletives and sexually derogatory descriptions). But admitted "What an idiot I was." The girl was Barbra Streisand.

Everyday he had a new story. Once he complained of severe back pain but still described in X-rated detail his all-night romp with two dancers from the Melody, a Times Square strip club.

His spicy talk and raunchy humor shielded his "heart of gold" added Kissane." He was the first to dig into his pocket to help someone whether it was some dreg on hard times, a whore from one of his old haunts or a highbrow who ran short of money drinking or snorting coke the night before.”

His generosity touched houses of worship, block associations and theater groups. Several years ago, he coproduced, with Denzel Washington, a series of vignettes written and directed by the late O.L. Duke, an actor friend who had trouble financing his work.

In the early sixties he served in the Navy and did two patrols in the Mediterranean. His mother, Freda and sister Sandy, of Georgia; two sons, Burton, of California, and Marlon, of Oregon; and two grandchildren, survive him.

"If you rub up against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you," is a quote from Damon Runyon's "A Very Honourable Guy."  Runyon definitely had Billy Kanafsky in mind.


Photo: Billy Kanafsky, Kacy Duke (celebrity personal trainer) and two legitimate friends. 
Photo by Rudi Papiri

(END)

44th STREET STRAYCAT SERENADE

I entered cyberspace as alley cat. It is an odd sobriquet for someone who grew up on West 44th Street in midtown Manhattan. My block is home to the Actor’s Studio,
and the New Dramatists in the once tough Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, home of the murderous Irish gang, the Westies.

City slicker, Broadway shuffle, forty-deuce, floozy, over-the-pan (our version of stick ball), stoop ball, knickers, (my grammar school, Holy Cross, made us wear them until the second grade) would have made sense. Friends laughed when I made my Internet debut as alley cat. Some thought I gave them a link to a porn site or a Chelsea boy hustle club.

Many assumed I liked cats. I never had one. I had hamsters, turtles, parakeets, a rabbit, a chick, (my mother baked it, by accident, in a hat box. A twelve-year-old friend told her to place a heating pad under the box to keep the chick warm) a dog, goldfishes and a large snapping turtle my mother made me toss in the rowboat lake at Central Park.

In my first apartment I unknowingly had a five-foot snake. The green, yellow, black serpent belonged to the previous tenant who left in a hurry. He owed six months rent, plus the cops wanted to ask him about his son’s “side business” as what else, a cat burglar.

One night the tenant left and took all his belongings. Well, almost everything. He left his pet snake behind. The serpent used to slither around the apartment freely. It disappeared a week before the dude departed and nestled itself behind the refrigerator near the motor. Two weeks later it emerged from its hiding place and startled my friend and super of my building, Francis, as he replaced my living room window. What happened next, you may ask? Alligators are not the only things floating in the city’s sewers.

Let’s return to the name game. I picked alley cat because as a kid I enjoyed watching the cartoon cats - Felix, Sylvester and Krazy Kat. (Years later I loved Broadway’s Victoria, the fetching white feline in the musical Cats. The beautiful, talented Cynthia Onrubia, a neighbor from long ago, originated the role on Broadway.

I liked Top Cat more than any other cartoon. Sassy, smartalecky Bowery Boy with whiskers and tail, Top Cat schemed his way around town and usually outsmarted Officer Dibble. Top Cat made me laugh. He also tweaked my imagination about the world that existed behind the six-story apartment building where I lived. For a seven-year-old boy this world contained mystery and an element of fear.

Many nights long piercing wails, similar to the cries of hungry, sick babies, sliced through the glass panes of my bedroom window. I woke up terrified. Scared and shivering I buried myself deeper under the covers. I knew babies did not live in the basement. Or did they? Hard to imagine these frightening human-like cries or caterwauling came from the alley cats living in the backyards of my block.

Huck Finn had the Mississippi. I had my backyard, a world far different from the busy, noisy streets out front. Not as long as Huck’s River, my backyard extended from Ninth to Tenth Avenues and stretched 21 buildings, including The Actor's Studio and The New Dramatists, two churches originally built for the Presbyterian and Lutheran faiths respectively.

Back then the city’s streets had no trees and flowers, a sharp contrast from today. In a thirty-block stretch we had only one green, leafy, shady oasis, DeWitt Clinton Park.
Hell’s Kitchen, and 44th street in particular, had many trees. They grew tall and lush hidden behind the century old brownstones and apartment buildings on my block. These trees often soared four, five and six stories high.

Ailanthus, the Tree of Heaven, the Poverty Tree, Frances Nolan’s tree in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, grew everywhere. It popped from the sides of buildings, cracks in the ground, from basements, and sewer gratings. It had big leaves and long branches, some extending the width of buildings.

One day I finally found the courage to leave the comfort of my building. I descended the rickety wooden stairwell connecting my building’s lobby to the courtyard and walked thirty feet to the catacomb-like passageway that led to the backyard. When I exited the walkway I discovered a magical place filled with these trees. I found sun-drenched gardens, waist high grass and shrubs and wild sunflowers. In this new playground I climbed old wooden fences and scaled ragged rock walls, some dating back to the 1850’s, which separated the yards.

Behind one building, my current home, my friends and I used to time our climbs or jumps from the six-foot high wall as we ran from one end of the yard to the other side ever fearful of the monster who lived inside the basement, an aging Doberman Pinscher. Once when the super spotted us climbing the fence, he yelled in frustration “Next time I’ll let my dog loose you brats. He eats boys like you.”

Even with this threat we knew this place belonged to us. Boys ruled. No parents to yell at us. No cars racing up the block to run us down. No traffic lights to limit our crossings. No one could stop us; not this super or the old man, who lived in a building in mid-block, the one we called the mad man, the deaf mute, with the large peach-sized lump on his head and a gimpy leg who always tried to whack us with his stick as we ran past him. He could not stop us. Nor could the drunken, chain-smoking, toothless, man who spewed cuss words in between his hacking cough while tossing cigarette butts from his second floor window as he constantly let go with cup-full globs of phlegm scraped up from his mucous clogged lungs. No one stopped us, no one except Big Red.

Red belonged on the Serengeti and not in a city backyard. A domestic cat discarded by his owner Red was a big cat in a little cat’s world. Long haired rusty colored, twice the size of any cat I had ever seen, Red led a colony of 20-30 throwaways.

They all belonged to Red. At least a dozen red colored cats lived in the backyard. Even years after his last sighting, cats with red streaks mixed with their black-gray charcoal colored fur lived on. You knew Red made his mark. Whenever we spotted Red our adventure ended for that day. Red had a tough, mean streak and he scared us.

One summer evening, I watched from the safety of my bedroom window, as a German Shepherd entered the courtyard - a fifty-by-fifty foot space between two buildings, named the Alton, my home, and the Lorraine. About ten cats slept on the wooden staircase. Others rested on metal storage containers, an old refrigerator and trashcans. All the cats scattered quickly when the crazed dog appeared.

Red stayed in his corner, the place where he had humped many a scraggy looking cat and virgin cast-offs. It was the same corner where a few years before the organ grinder and his monkey would sing and dance performing for pennies and nickels tossed down to them by the woman hanging their wash from clothes lines crisscrossing the courtyard from the apartments above.

Trapped between a wall and the garbage chute, Red had no room to run. Before the shepherd pounced on him, Red arched his back, his fur stiffened. As the dog moved closer Red hissed loudly, bared his teeth and swatted his big paw at the dog’s face. With one quick powerful stroke he ripped opened the shepherd’s nose. The dog’s fury disappeared. He whimpered loudly then turned and ran chased by Big Red. The cat earned his place in block lore.

I am no longer an alley cat. I have graduated from email to web searching to the blogosphere. Now I have my own bog and dallied about with many names. I liked streetwalker. It is a perfect fit for me. I have walked all over my city and a few others, but a Filipino office worker already snatched it. His blog www.manilastreetwalker has great photos of Manila and his travels abroad.

So I remain a cat but I have renamed myself stray cat. Alley cat is provincial, territorial. Stray cats roam the streets searching for something different, just like Top Cat. It is a reflection of me, a stray cat in the big city. Hopefully I can skillfully capture and write about what I find and learn from my wanderings and share these things with you.

This blog is not just about my block or Hell’s Kitchen. You will read stories about New York City and points beyond. I shall report, interview and write about people, places, neighborhoods, buildings, urban issues, new developments and the social and historical fabric of this city – things that interest me and hopefully will interest you too.

Please drop in whenever you have a chance. Comments and insights are encouraged. Photos by Straycat