LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN
With Stephen Lang, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Burt Young, Peter Dobson, Jerry Orbach, and Alexis Arquette.
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Back in the 60s, I read only one of the six stories in Selby’s book–“Tralala,” which is about a teenaged hooker and which occasioned a celebrated obscenity trial when the Provincetown Review published it in 1961–and I was dissuaded from reading farther. As powerful as this story was, its sledgehammer aesthetics were more brutalizing than sensitizing, and while it had all the authenticity of a personally conducted tour of hell, it left me feeling bruised but not wiser. In comparison to, say, James T. Farrell’s heartbreaking short story “The Scarecrow,” which deals with a related subject, “Tralala” has the effect of a bludgeon.
In one episode, for instance, Tralala knocks a soldier with a wounded leg unconscious. Angry and impatient that he has wanted to spend a whole hour talking to her, she pockets his cash and throws away his wallet. When he turns up later at the bar where he initially picked her up, begging for his ID card, she and a couple of hoods stuff his bloody handkerchief into his mouth and beat him to a pulp. “Before they left Tralala stomped on his face until both eyes were bleeding and his nose was split and broken and kicked him a few times in the balls”; when they later hear that he might go blind in one eye, they all enjoy a good laugh. About 15 pages later, in a single sentence that extends for about four pages, Tralala is gang-raped, tortured, mutilated, and possibly killed in a vacant lot; four of her acquaintances look at her broken body and roar with laughter.
Apart from Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the other major characters include her pimp, Vinnie (Peter Dobson); a male drug addict named Georgette (Alexis Arquette) who is attracted to Vinnie; Harry Black (Stephen Lang), a shop steward with a wife and baby who becomes interested in a gold-digging homosexual during a steel strike; Boyce (Jerry Orbach), the union leader; Big Joe (Burt Young), one of the strikers; Big Joe’s pregnant daughter Donna (Ricki Lake) and his coworker Tommy (John Costelloe), who may have caused Donna’s pregnancy and who is persuaded to marry her; and to round out the circle, Big Joe’s son Spook (Cameron Johann), who has a schoolboy crush on Tralala.
