What's happened? You bad motherfuckers. It's Tuesday, December the 3rd. This is the church, the New Testament. Today, I got a friend coming on here. I've known him forever. His name is Lucio Fernandez. We're going to cover a couple of little situations here. Lee's here, his feet are dangling off the little fucking chair, like a little kid in the back seat. I got to give him a French ride from Wendy's, and that's it. We're here. Let's get this party started. Greetings from Podcastville. The church, New Testament, is brought to you by freeze pipe. You don't need to wait for snow to smoke out of an ice cold bomb. Freeze pipe has your cupboard. Freeze pipe makes showable pieces that give you a good time with no throat burning and no coughing up a lung. I love freeze pipe. Each freeze pipe comes with a glycerin chamber that you put in the freezer. When you're ready to light, you take it out, put it in the bong. Once the smoke passes through it, your smoke gets cooled by over 300 degrees. Again, I love the pipe, whether it's the bubbler, the bong, the pipe, the dab rigs, you're going to find what you're looking for with freeze pipe. So don't be a favor. The holidays are coming. Somebody in your life needs a bong, whether it's grandma, the priest, somebody. Right now, you could shop at thefreezepipe.com and press and code Diaz for 10% off your order. Did you hear me? That's a Christmas breeder right there. 10% off your order when you press and code Diaz. That's thefreezepipe.com and code Diaz for 10% off. Order today and get free shipping and say goodbye to harsh smoke forever. 10% off your TVs run for your lives. It's over. They didn't put you on this planet just to give up. If I'm with you, you can do it. I can rule the world. That's where you got to be thinking. Welcome back to church! What's up, you bad motherfuckers? Uncle Joey back here with my buddy Lucio, Lee Syat. What's up, Lucio? What's up, Joey? Thanks for having me, man. Oh, any time. Lucio, how far back do we go? Oh, my God. Since you came to McKinley's school, 6th grade or something, you came in 5th, 6th grade. 6th grade. That's how far back. Now, you were in the class with me? Labido? No, man. It's so funny about that. I actually, no. I wasn't in 6th grade. No, I wasn't in Miss Grobowski. Miss Grobowski. And then Miss Grobowski got me to skip 7th grade. No shit. Have you been pushing the 8th grade? I skipped 7th grade. I remember this towards the spring. I had to take a couple of classes with the 7th grade, so I could skip 7th, but I went right to 8th grade. Wow. So I know in your long time, except you're like 300 years older than me, I'm much younger than you. Yeah, I don't know. You're younger than I am. I still remember you at my house lifting weights. Do you remember that? Do you remember that? Do you let me tell the story about lifting weights with you? We were training. We were training. There was some karate guy that hung out with you. That's what that is, man. Some crazy karate guy. I always wear white tank tops, you know, like guinea t's. Always wear a white tank top, and we would work out of your house, and you were supposed to be spotting me. He was supposed to be spotting me. I don't know where he went, but those weights fell right on my head, and I look, and I'm in pain, and he's over there in the corner cracking up with the karate guy, and the karate guy was lost. He was like, what is going on here? Who the fuck was the karate guy? I can't remember his name with the white t-shirt. Always wear a white tank top. Oh my God. I don't have as so many crazy karate guys. I was going to say you would tell stories about like he had basically had a karate fight club for a little bit, didn't you? Well, that was in North Bergen with a kid named Mario Diaz. There was a Chinese Cuban kid. His name was Mario Diaz. His father was a doctor, and I think Mario Diaz went to Fujia Paikungfu. I went to Ishinru and Union City on New York Avenue. 30th Street. No. When we were kids, there was Fujia Paikungfu, and then there was Ushinru Karate, Kevin Norlander, Wayne Norlander. He was on 16th Street in New York Avenue. The guy used to check your report cards. If you fucking got a B or C, he would make you do jumping jacks, and then put you on the side, and you got to do homework, where everybody was flying through the air. It was tremendous. It was tremendous. But we had, you know, we're talking about North Bergen, right? We went to North Bergen first. When did you leave McKinley? I graduated from McKinley in '77, and I didn't want to go. I wanted to stay in North Bergen. I had it all set up to go to North Bergen High School. I was going to be playing baseball over there. I was going to be playing basketball. I was going to be running track. And all of a sudden my mom and dad said, "No, we're moving to Union City. I couldn't believe it. My whole life fell apart." So in '77, that summer of '77, we packed out bags and moved to Union City. Wow. Big change. Big changes. And what school did you go to Union City? I went to Union Hill, Union Hill High School. It was different. Union Hill, it was different. It was different. It was all mostly Hispanic, you know. But it was a whole different ball game. In McKinley School, the teachers really cared. They wanted you to learn. They were, you know, you talked about how Mr. Barone had your last episode. Mr. Barone, you talked about Mr. Agresta. You talked about, you know, Mr. Miss. Mr. Miss? These people cared. I have a great story about Mr. Miss. Mr. Miss was the best. Mr. Miss was in the class with us one day because one of our teachers got sick of something. And Mr. Miss was a good-looking blonde dude. The girls loved him. He looked just like Robert Redford with a mustache. He was yoked. And he was okay. And one day he was the teacher. They put both eighth grades together. And they said, we need to talk to you about something. We have an organization that wants to talk to you kids about helping them out. Okay. Mr. Miss comes in with the white dude. The white dude opens up his briefcase. I'll never forget this. Opens up his briefcase. And he starts taking notes on and he goes, how are you doing boys and girls? I'm here to talk to you about a disease that's hitting kids. They can't walk, you know, you start walking, something fucked up. But then he goes, and they can only move three steps per every 30 minutes. And the guy goes, do we have any ideas on how we could take care of this? And Richie Colombo with somebody raised the hand. He goes, give them roller skates. And the guy looked down, closed the suitcase, went, I'll never forget that. And he goes, they told me not to talk to this class. That was one of the last tonight. I don't know when was the last time I saw Mr. Miss. What's your Mr. Mr. Miss was he was a holler. Like you say he was a good looking guy, strong. And you know, he became the basketball coach. And man, we were great in basketball, street basketball. We played at the court on 28th Street all the time. We played there all the time. David Ruiz, you know, myself, you know, a bunch of us. We left. Yeah. Lefty. Chucky, we used to come up once in a while. He was really, really, he was really tiny. Remember Chucky? He was fast. Very good. Anyway, so Mr. Miss comes into culture. So we were great at street basketball. But when we got in a court, man, we stung, I remember one game they called the three the three second penalty, I mean, like 10 times, we didn't know how to play in the court. We never practice. I remember these two, we say, let's go practice a Kennedy school down on 10th Street. And we used to walk down there in the rain, the snow, it doesn't matter. No coach, nothing. We suffer if if anything one time a week. So we were playing against all these other schools and we stunk. But Mr. Miss said, listen, oh, no, no, wait, wait, no, no, we will start winning every game we'll be winning by halftime. And then we will lose every single game. We lost every game. But Mr. Miss said, you guys dress up, dress up, we'll get all the girls. You guys will get all the girls. If stress up doesn't matter how bad you play, you guys will look good. And that's what we did with our little polyester shirts on and and one of the bell bottoms and stuff. And we'll go there and pick up the girls. That's what we did. Who was on your team, man? I know I know David Rose. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. My ting sito play. You remember? He sure. He's still talking about. Yeah. And yeah, I don't know if Martin played. I know Chucky played Jimenez, maybe. I don't remember Peter. We had some crazy motherfuckers in that school. Now, it's funny that, listen, basically we're both from Union City. You know, I grew up in North Bergen. I went to high school and grammar school for a few years, but I've been going to Union City since I was in fucking diapers, you know, and I went to Ocortarito. This is how this whole shit started with you. I went to Ocortarito one day and I'm there with my daughter. You know, you're sitting outside. It's 80 degrees. I'm looking around. I see this building. I'm like, I know that fucking building. I keep looking at it and looking at it. And I go, that's what my father died. North Hudson Hospital across the street from the Dairy Queen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I went on a ride with my daughter. I'm like, oh, I know a lot about Union City. Like I was here when 48th Street was just cigars going down the street. It was just cigar shops, fucking cigar shops. If you went from Bergen line down to like Palisade or New York Avenue, what would have fucked it was? You know, I mean, you had the colony theater on 48th Street. We had the other theater. You know, I just, I didn't even know this. You know that fucking, what's the comedian, the old guy with the cigar burns? I got the Hudson Theater. He met some great big burns in Union City at the Hudson Theater. Your grandmother, his grandmother grew up in Union City. She's telling me a story once that she used to talk to Fidel while she was waiting on the bus. Fidel came up to her and talked to her and she goes, I didn't know what his fucking guy was. But he was a gentleman. She goes, I figured out years later, he was Fidel. Like Fidel started his revolution in Union City. He has some media on 26 years, 20 something. So you had a meeting with some people down there. Yeah, I don't know where. And he got arrested. Yeah. He got arrested in Union City. Fidel, you're talking about Fidel Castro? Yes. What was he doing in Union City? That's where the revolution started. Union City whatever part of Florida, where Tampa was or some shit like that. And Miami, when they were going to do the Bay of Pigs and all that, oh, before the bed, before he was going to go home. But Tista's fucking job. But that all went down. Are you, are you Cuban as well? Yeah, it's not my fault. I was born there. I know. Oh, you were born there too. I was born there. Yeah. Because it was, I was driving back from Jersey the other day. And you had told me, Joey, that like you moved, like your mom moved here partially because of like the, like the sewing industry. Yes. And they had a sign right at the Lincoln tunnel, like New Jersey, the home of embroidery, like 1837 of the fucking. That was true. From the 1800s. You know why? Why? The German machines, the Shiffley machines, they had to stand in solid rock. And the only area that had the solid rock, Bluestone, Union City is based on Bluestones. So that's the only place like they can anchor these, whatever two ton machines. So the embroidery industry grew in Union City and West New York. It was huge. They did all the patches worldwide, everything, everything came from Union City, West New York. Union City was the embroidery capital of the world. It's also the burlesque capital of the world. The burlesque capital of the world. Yeah. Do they need to reinforce it for that? They don't have no burlesque clubs no more. No, no. You know how many, there was a lot of theaters in Union City. You had the cinema. You remember the cinema? The Hippodrome, the Lincoln Theater, the Twin State, which was on 48th, which CVS is on 48th and Burgline. The Colony Theater, you had theaters all over Union City. And there was a lot, a lot of people that started Union City. You know, Frank Sinatra, when he was with whatever for the group before he went solo, they sang at the Lincoln Theater on 32nd Street with Davis. You remember Davis, Davis, a toy store on Burgline Avenue in 32nd Street? It was right there. Around the corner where Mi Bandeda was, that used to be a theater, the Lincoln Theater, okay, before it became years and years old, not the Park Theater, Lincoln Theater. And there, you had all these big stars that performed there. Now, the Park Theater is by the four-star diet. Right. The best BLT for fucking years. My mother would stop that dream in the morning and get me a BLT and shit. Tremendous. How do you have the best BLT? It's just really good bacon. It was really good tomatoes. Okay. Take bacon, like it's back in the, you know, now it's both like every else. It's the best turkey club. And it's the turkey club. Oh my god, the turkey club there. What the? The turkey club. The turkey club. No, the turkey club sandwich there. No, they just closed it. The diner closed about a year ago. Really? Yeah, diner club. And my florist across the street clubs. I had a florist. I'd go on and bring florists to my mother. I wanted a word in Columbia. We're never coming back. That's how it works out. But it's so funny how like I was driving that day at my door and I started telling them, you know, like I remember, I don't remember nothing about you in the city until my father died. And then I remember being, we lived across the street from the grammar school on 29th and Central. Where I've been walking. I lived on that street. We had a garage and the whole thing. And then after that, I don't know what happened. And then we ended up in New York City. But my mother always had that bar in Union City. So wherever she went, I went. There was no fucking day cares. You know, who lived around the corner from you? You're going to die. Tony Orlando. In more, bro? No, near. No, no, no. Oh, yeah. In Union City. Originally, yeah, Tony Orlando was from Union City, New Jersey. I mean, it's just fucking insane. You know, and then I would just go visit and I would walk because you had my mother had 29th Street. So I covered from 29th to 48th. She would go, don't go past 48th. And you walk back and forth. The 48th Street, when we were growing up, we had our own little world there. I mean, Union City was probably one of the most unique little towns. Like, I could tell you a thousand Saturdays that we went to the cinema. Like, the cinema is where I saw the longest yard. Right. It's where I saw Rocky. It's where I saw Tommy. I saw so Bruce Lee. Fuck. They always had the midnight show. And then you walk down Bergen line and you had Ponte Corvo fruit next to the toy store with a lot of boxes. Oh, that's what I'm talking about. Davis Davis. Beat the fuck out of boxes. They'd be all over Bergen line. And then we'd run away because I thought the cops are going to chase them. There was no fucking cops. Fucking crazy. And there was a go-go bar there right on 32nd Street. Yeah. Yeah. Now, when I first remember being at my mother's bar, there was an Italian deli across the street. This is 66, 67, 68 that I would go over and they'd pick me up and I'd stick my hand and he'd always give me an apple or fruit or an orange or some shit. I don't want no fucking orange. I want it to candy. Things are candy. Then he left and a new moon Chinese restaurant moved in. Oh, wow. Like, there was just so many things. But the thing that sticks in my head of the most about Union City was when I was about seven, two kids got kidnapped. You remember that? Yeah, remember that. When I was about seven, two kids got abducted by the towers, some tower in Union Troy towers or something like that. Some went down Edison school. I don't even know if Edison schools still exist. No, that still exists. Yeah. I think it was on seventh right off of... Right down there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right off of some of them. And I'll never forget that just because I went to my mother's bar and I did all these things in Union City, I felt like I had a gut. I told my mom I'm going through their wake and she's like, "What are you fucking crazy? I gotta go." I went down it had to be 2,000 people. I never forget that I was like, "This is Union City. This is real. These people fucking are out and they're going to find this motherfucker and kill them when they do." You know? And then I remember that fire on 28th in Bergen line, there was a boy, up the block from Hernandez, which we'll talk about later in school. These motherfuckers on the art of human sandwiches. Yeah, these motherfuckers all know nothing. And that burnt down overnight during the holidays. And I still am going to my mother's bar and the front was just filled with clothes and people were giving money. And I don't know how old I was, but he had two boys in my age. In 1993, I moved with George. I come back in and I go to a gym in North Bergen day on the gym. I paid for the membership and they were like, "You're the Norris son." Yeah, they go, "Kiss your money." You remember when you took care of us? And you were sitting with the kids? They fucking remembered it. They go, "You work out here for free and we'll fucking train you." Wow. And that was all from fucking Union City. You didn't see it. It's a small, but a powerful little goddamn place. Union City's a great city. It's a great little city. It's great. You know, for the longest time, we were the most densely populated city in the whole country. Into just a couple of years ago, that Guttenberg became the most densely populated city in the whole United States. But Union City forever was the most densely populated city in the country. Now does Guttenberg still have the record for most bars per capita? I have no idea. I'm just blown away because you guys kind of look alike. Not, but you guys have almost the same beginning. And then you come and you have the little thing in the suit jacket. You guys started almost exactly the same. And then it's so crazy. You guys came from the same place. Oh, it's going to get better, cocksucker. So you graduated Union Hill. Where'd you go? I went from when I graduated Union Hill, I went to Rutgers. And I was going to go to New Brunswick, and then I was already working in New York. So I said, let me stay in New York so I can work in New York. So I was working in New York. Now what were you doing in New York? I was acting. I was an actor. I never thought in a million years when I was growing up, I wanted to be a baseball player. And then all of a sudden, I want to date myself, in freshman year, freshman year in high school, I won a dance competition. Disco was big. So I won a disco championship in New Jersey and New York. So that got me on to so factory disco. You remember so factory? Sure. So that got me on the TV show. So they got me on that TV show. And I used to, it's so funny because I used to go to so factory disco, I was underage. And I remember my cousin, he used to wait for me outside by the side door and he was, you know, giving me his ID. So I can go around and come in with using his ID. And I was young. I was like, whatever, 14th. Anyway, I got into the TV show. And every week I was on so factory disco. I had sometimes I was featured, sometimes I was just a crowd, but I was on the show. And when I, this is freshman year in high school in Union Hill, nobody saw me. Nobody. I didn't see it. No, no, nobody, nobody like guided me to show business or anything, nobody, nobody. I kind of sort of tripped into it. Can you just explain what soul fact, it sounds like it was like, what was that love train or what was that soul train? It was like soul train, American bandstand or something like that. And it was just disco music. It was just dancing the whole time. And then you saw, you saw a Karen Young, you remember Karen Young will come on and the Commodore's and all these people come and perform, lip sync, but they will perform. And then these little states that they had, and we were just dancing. And sometimes I had, I got featured because I wanted the state. And there I met this couple, Jeff and Donna Shelley, they were a dance team. And I started taking dance classes with them. And then that was the beginning. And then I got, somehow I got into, oh, then when I went to Rutgers, this kid that went to Union Hill with me said, listen, I was going to be an engineer. He goes, I want to take you somewhere. I said, where? Took me to Rutgers, the Black Box Theater in Rutgers, Newark. I saw the Black Box Theater and I said, man, that's what I want to do. I want to act. Within a year's time, I was, I was signed in New York. I was trying to do soaps and all that. I couldn't act to save my life. I couldn't dance. I couldn't sing. I had, I had no ability, but I had the desire. I wish you could fucking dance. So, so I got, I got into all these shows and I got into the soaps. I did a bunch of films. I did a bunch of soaps. I did a bunch of musicals and plays and the whole bit. And, and that took me all over the world. That's what I did for a long time, for a very long time. That's insane. Sounds like you were pretty good at it. Yeah. I was all right. I was, you know, I was, I was willing to stand on my head. I did the directors to do this and I would just do it. I had, you know, and plus I was athletic. So, you know, you're athletic in the musical theater world and so you're dancing masculine. They want people who dance masculine. So I was, you know, I did West Side Story for five and a half years of my life every day, every major production. I did Chorus Line. I did Jesus Christ Superstar. I did Guys and Dolls. Were you on Broadway or? I did the Broadway National Tours. Oh, so like the one that would travel around the city? Yeah. So I did, for West Side Story, I did the European company, the national company, the world tour, the European tour, the Paris company, the Japan company. We were supposed to come to Broadway and then... You did West Side Story in Japan? I did West Side Story five and a half years of my life every single day, eight shows a week. Could you still do it right now? I have. Eight shows. I can't imagine doing eight shows a week. Man, it felt when you got off the tour, it felt like you will have been to war. Everything hurt. Everything. My knees, my back, my... I played Chino in West Side Story, so I was shooting the gun, so I had a tendonitis on my elbow from shooting the gun every night. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of work. And a lot of commitment. People don't realize it. People have no idea what goes into theater. Like, I've got no auditions here for theater. I'm like, they better not call me. They better not fucking call me because they wanted me to do whatever. Guys and Dolls, two years ago. You'll be great. You'll be great, guys and Dolls. But the one guy, the crazy guy, and I was like, I don't know. And the guy called me up, listen, we really want you to do it, but we were here twice a day to fucking Saint Smidgen today. I don't like it. I think guys and Dolls were Lorna Luft. You remember Lorna Luft? I remember the name. Liza Minnelli's sister. Lorna Luft. You remember Steve, the guy who played Steve in Mary with Children? Yeah. He was in the company I did. You remember? Oh, Fish. You remember? Fish, what's his name? Abe Bogota. Abe Bogota. He came in and had to let him go. He couldn't do the role. No, he's too old. He got to remember. This is by this years ago. I know he can't dance. No, no, no. He was 100 years ago. He was 100 when he was a godfather. He was 100 when he was a godfather. Yeah, yeah. I'd just see in the restaurant. They always play Italian movies. And there was a part when he asked what's his name? Who gives a fuck? But he was all done. He was all done. So when I went to Rutgers, I was doing all the stuff in New York. And ICM signed me for commercials. So I would do all these commercials and stuff. I was making a living at it. And that's all I did for a long time. And then until I ended up back in Union City somehow. So you have your sad card and everything? Yeah, got a sad after and equity, you know, everything for forever. Equity too. I don't even have a fucking equity. After it's done, they're like mixed with sag now. Yeah, it's not the same. It's not the same. So, I mean, you've done, so I guess, have you ever done plays, Joey? Have you done play? All the time. You saw me doing the king and I when I was one. Like, what was your favorite, Lucio? Between all of them, between plays? The most, I mean, probably West Side Story. But between plays, like commercials, TV. Ah, plays, plays. Yeah, that was a lot. When I was when I was on Rutgers, that's what I studied, you know, theater. I wanted to be a theater actor. I never thought in a million years I was going to become like a film producer and stuff like that. That was not my thing. My thing was going to be, I was a serious actor. In fact, I worked that. I know you guys sort of heard of Spanish Repertory Theater in New York. I worked there for three and a half years. It was the premier Hispanic speaking theater in New York. And I worked there as a lead actor for three and a half years and did everything. It was a, it's a, it's a repertory company. So, on any given week and one week and three days, Friday, Sunday, they're five different plays. So, you're, you're, it's a true repertory company. So, you're learning all these plays at once. You can be doing a classical play, a Lorka play, and then you do a contemporary play, only Spanish. It's insane. When I got off a tour, I had just met my wife. I just met my wife and I turned down all these tours. And I started working in Spanish rep. The first script I got in Spanish, I was like, what? And my, my wife is, you know, American. She had to teach me, helped me learn this script. Finetically, I couldn't, I didn't know what, what I was reading. I never read in Spanish, you know. So, I became, I was there for three and a half years and it helped me out to, for later on, what I, you know, becoming a commissioner and stuff like that helped me because then I was bilingual, you know, that helped a lot. I could speak Spanish, I could read Spanish, I could write a little Spanish, but Spanish auditions, I just tap out. I'm not interested. I can't because listen, there was a show on in the early and the late '90s on Tallamundo. It was a Cuban family, not, not. Not, not. No, this was one that came later. And when I got caught from my agent, it was going there and reading. I didn't want you to read for the Cuban dog guy. Well, I go down there and it's all these Cuban people. They're very nice, but they ain't Cubans like us. Okay. So I never forget, like, I read the role, booked it, went on the next day and doing rehearsal. I set a line and they all were like, like, they were a fucking up-the-duty Cubans, right? And then we started doing the scene, scene, scene, scene, and they all had problems, like, they were too fucking emotional. And he's not doing it right, like, I'm out of the head type. And I went to lunch and they called me and I said, you got fired, but they got to pay for you after car. I said, fine, fuck it. A thousand bucks. They took out of my future. But and then about 25 years later, 20 years later, I'm doing COVID. I'm walking at that park. Okay. They did all the rallies by our house and during COVID, the guy that played the cousin on the George Lopez show, he was on the show. And he came over to me, goes, hey, man, I just want you to know, I haven't seen you since that day, but it wasn't me who got you fired. It was those other fucking Cubans had this, thick up their asses. And I was like, okay, good to know. I don't give a fuck. I'll never read again. But that's why, because my Spanish is completely different than their Spanish. And when I say a weird union city word, they fucking lose it. Because we grew up speaking Spanish. We spoke Spanish. But we spoke, I spoke that shit that they came with you from the revolution. Yeah. Those people spoke differently. They cooked differently. They act. Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. It's a different fucking world. And it's still indebted. Like it's still in my fucking soul, how those guys walked around and I don't know. It's just, I can't, I've tried even, they always make me read the fucking Mexicans and Colombians. I get one Cuban. And you know, it's not gonna work. Like it just doesn't work. I don't know what the fuck it is. I remember when Scarface came out. Okay. And I said, where are the Cubans? I know Stephen Bower is in it. It's the only Cuban. But where are the Cubans? There's a ton of Cubans everywhere. The Cuban nuances were not there. You know, I mean, Pacino tried, you know, his best. And it's a cult classic. But where the Cuban nuances that machismo, the way that the Cubans talked away might step that talk to your dad talked and the Cubans growing up in union city were different. They're tough, they were tough. But it wasn't just the way they looked. You know what I mean? It was a whole different kind of Cuban. And that wasn't represented in the film. Well, when they was getting ready for that film, it was Little Angel Salazar got dressed as a soul. That kind of prep, Pacino, for a lot of stuff. But it got so bad that they didn't have no Cubans that when they working in the fucking bait in the coffee shop, he quits. I remember they quit. Right before that scene, there's a guy who comes up and says, oh, yeah, I said it, boy, I'm on my I'm on. You remember that? That's angel Salazar off camera doing over really. Yeah, they had no Cubans. And in their defense, you had Angel and the other guy. What a lot of people don't know is that movie was cast in Miami. But really shot in LA. That's what I didn't know that nobody knew. Over the years now, I kept meeting people from Scarface. And I would ask them questions. In fact, I shot a movie with Pepysirna. They got to cut his arm off. And he told me he stole the extra arm and he sold it for 75 grand. That's the whole fucking thing. But he was telling me what happened. They were down there in Miami and the Cubans shut them out. So they had a shutdown. Hey, everybody for six months and go to California and start all over again. Like 10th City. I thought that was Miami. Yeah, it wasn't. That's under the 405. The mother of the house, when he goes to the mother's house, that's a little house by the airport in LAX. I like where they put fucking migrants or whatever. Yeah. I don't know what they do. But all that stuff was LA. And then the two guys that shoot Tony in the disco, the one guy was my buddy. And he told me the whole story. He was an extra. He was doing extra work for the holidays to pick up money and fuck him. He was at the table getting coffee. And the director came up to him or Brian the Palmer came up to him and said, hey, what are you in this? And he goes, I'm away. He goes, fuck that. You're a hit man now. And it made him an actor. He was always an extra. That was his first acting role. So he was telling me how they just had a lot of problems with that movie. They finished that. But that last scene, the shooting scene, did you ever hear any about that? No, no, no. That's Steven Spielberg. They were in Miami for a fucking directors conference. If you see who was shooting in every, they had like 10 cameras. So Brian said, every director come down here and get on a fucking camera and shoot. All those motherfuckers are in there. Really? All of them. No idea. Because there was a director's convention for like a week in Florida, something like that. But that's what the defense was on that. But listen, if you go to Hollywood, people get pissed all the time. Look at fucking Major League. They put Serrano. He ended up being the president of the United States on a fucking show. There's no other Cuban, you know. But casting is fucking a different world. But the movie became a classic classic. It had a ton of money. Ton of ton of money. And it came out on December 25th. Did you know that? Sparkly's got released on Christmas fucking day. So people going to the movies thinking it was a family fucking movie. Did you see the premiere gone? Oh man. The premiere. The funniest was a lady from Dynasty. When they said to her, you're leaving and she goes, I've heard enough Fox for a lifetime. But there was a lot of iconic things. When Michelle Pfeiffer comes down in the elevator, the one shot is beautiful. Beautiful. The one scene when he's completely stoned out of his mind. And he's talking to her, you know, look at you. You know, have a whatever as a wife, you know. Junk, you know. That scene was just unbelievable. So many great scenes. It's a fucking great movie. Yeah, it's a great film. It's a great film. You know, and I don't know. I remember when that movie came out, I would change this area. You know, Union City. Listen, man, when you look at the statistics and shit, like the Cubans took it over, like you were talking about the Germans and the Dutch and there was Indians there. And then the Cubans started coming in like in '50 before the revolution, you know. And they just built this beautiful little fucking community. You know, they really worked hard. When the Cubans came burglar and avenue, there was no burglar and avenue. There was nothing. All the stores were closed. You got a bunch of Italians selling fruit from the fruit carts. My dad told me, my dad came in '65. He goes, burglar and avenue, all the shops are pretty much closed. The Cubans built it up. As the, you know, Italians moved out, we still had some Italians growing up in Oregon. Italian and Irish and Germans, you know. And, but burglar and avenue was, the Cubans built it up. All of Union City. All the embroidery that stayed for a long time, because of the Cubans. Do you remember about better on Alito? Alito, yeah. He was across the street from the cinema. So if you were lucky, your mom would give you 10 bucks and you go see on Alito first. You'd sit in this chair. From the minute you sat down on Alito made a fucking spectacle. His hair cuts weren't good. But when you left there, you thought you were a fucking carry grant. Okay. Because he, he do the fucking thing. And then he do like dust and shit. And then he be cutting your hair and he go, me, like Alindo. And he start with that. Oh, yeah, by this, so my dita. And he be cutting your hair. No, no, no, moo, we stop. And then he would fucking keep combing it. And at the end, even though a lump was long on the other, he put some spit on it and he put purple lights on. Yeah. I don't remember the lights. Remember the lights? Oh my God. This stuff brought the soldier on the optical illusion. It gives you shines. And everybody shot music on and he moved with you. I look good. And you get home, your hair's all fucked up. You're like, fuck it. I ain't going back. The hell it was. It's like one of those floodlights with color on it and it goes, give a special shine. Why would you go get more? Why would you go back? If it looked that bad, I have to like the second or third time. But you bought it. You drank it. It was the same, man. It wasn't the head do you were paying for the scene? And then they'd be Cuban, do his dad talking about it and say, where we'll be in his style and about you like eight and they'd be talking about women. Me neither. I fucking do this. And you're like, oh my God, these guys are fucking savages. Savages. Pastore music. That closed her a couple of years ago. Fuck. And it just, when I was a kid, it was three floors. Yeah. And then every time I came back, it would go to two floors, one floor. And then there was a strip club, not a strip club. It should have been a strip club. There was a club there in the 90s called the Players Club. Yeah. Where was that? Where was the players club? Right next to Pastore. Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. And then became a party school. Yeah, remember. And I went up there one day and there was 20 hookers. I got like 20 bucks to do the show. There had to be 20 hookers up there. And one of them was a North American girl. I remember, I was like, no, I know your sister. Oh my God. Oh my God. So like, can you guys explain? Because I have no idea. But like, you both came, both born in Cuba. Like what is like, it's crazy that you both like Scarface, like all these, what does it mean to you to be like, be from Cuba like that? How does like, how does that change your life or how does it is a plan in your life now? It seems like you guys have a lot of similar stories. Candlesia. Growing up in Cuba, but I mean, you're born in Cuba, but you're raised in, you're raised in an area where you had this, this mix of all kinds of people. Like I said, just before we had, we had the Italians, we had Germans, we had the Irish and everybody called each other names, but everybody got along great. You got a fist, you got a fist fight with this guy because he called you a spick one day and you called him a guinea. And the next day you were hanging out. It was a different kind of thing. There was no one waiting for you in the corner to stab you. Everybody took care of each other, it was a different kind of thing. You know, everybody got along. I remember I drive down Kennedy Boulevard with my son on 27th Street. I tell my son, this is why I used to hang out, this street corner right here, I used to play stick ball, manhunt, tag, hide, hide, hide and seek. We played everything, we played football, and you remember Nabisco? Fuck yeah. We played football in Nabisco or Santa Fe, we used to play football there in the snow, we, oh bloody, the elbow is bloody. And so we grew up in an area, grew up in an area that's a mixture of people. And everybody got along. It was like, it was a great place to grow up in. You know what I mean? So it was different than being born in Cuba, growing up in Cuba, and coming here with this culture. No, no, you've created this culture over a mixture of people. So would you like, obviously you're Cuban, but like, would you say like you're more like this area of New Jersey, like that's more of your personality? I probably have more in common with you than with a Cuban coming from Cuba now. Okay. You grew up in this area, you understand the economy of it. You understand the food, you understand the people, you understand the language, the attitude. It's different. Some Cubans come now, you can't really read them, you know? Where's he coming from? Where's someone from Union City? You know where they're coming from? You understand, you know, someone from North Burger, you know where they're coming from, you know, you know the walk, you know what, you know, when you know, you know, right? And it's different. It's different. So when people ask me, like even my son, my son says to me, well, sometimes you tell people you're Cuban, sometimes you tell them you're American. I say, I'm American. I grew up here. I'm an American citizen. I gave up my citizenship years ago. I'm American through and through. I love this country. I do anything for this country. This country gave me and my family everything. It's a beautiful country, man. There's nothing like, there's nothing like the United States of America. Nothing. And that's what these fucking Salamukis can understand. And then they want to fucking walk around and just fucking talk shit, you know, coming from a Cuban house bro, whatever the fuck you think and whatever the fuck they thought, my mother was pro-American. And if I, if my mother would have lived, I would have been in the army because they felt these fucking Cubans felt that they saved their lives. So now we have to fight for them. I mean, they're really pro-Americans, man. And they got fucked over in the whole thing. And some people forgave Kennedy. You go to some Cubans houses. They got a picture of Kennedy with a bullet hole in the fucking thing still. You know, that's some Cubans. That's the way it is. But when I was young, I didn't really know what it meant to be Cuban. I didn't really know. We came from such a one day we were eating at a master lease house, one day we were eating that Johnny Black's house one day. You know, you don't really know until you become a man and you become older and you see what you've made up. And there was a lot of times when I walked into auditions or comedy clubs with my balls on the line and I go, you know what, my mother didn't come here for me to be a fucking punk. You know, my mother didn't fucking leave her family to come here for me to be a fucking punk. That's number one. Number two, it just, I don't know, I don't know. But I've always started feeling Cuban after I did time. When I went to prison and got locked up, that's where my Cuban also came out. It just came out in prison. Like, I'll tell you, if you fucking touch me, I'll kill one of your motherfuckers. You know, and it was just a state of mind. It's just a state of mind. Being from North Bergen is a state of mind. Those days will never happen again. Absolutely. Now, when I look at those North Bergen football teams, nobody was bigger than six feet and they fucking won a state championship. Number one in the East Coast, that's little Italians that came from Hoboken. Because nobody knows the story about Hoboken, how the Irish wouldn't let the Italians pass 9th Street. When you do that to somebody, those motherfuckers get hot. So they came up here to smack Irish people. I don't know what it did. Half of the people we grew up with, at the end of the day, are all bloodline Hoboken people. But Rome, but he asked the police. I mean, there's a thousand of them that are from Hoboken. Thousands of them. And I want to know what happened in Hoboken that made the kids I grew up with, the kids you grew up with, animals. We were fucking animals. You know, we talked about Peter Jimenez. That dude was jumping out in front of a car and getting hit by a car to sue people. And finally, when they jumped in front of a car, they killed him. You know what I'm saying? Like, no, yeah. Wasn't Peter like 17 in sixth grade or 17? Yeah, he got the pilot program. I swear to God, he was 17. Bro, he had hairy legs and hairy armpits. Yeah, he's playing basketball. That's the truth. Fuck his arms. What are you talking about? His way to make money was to get hit by a car. And sue and sue a monkey. People are crazy. And about 20 years ago, he jumped out in front of a car. Do you remember this guy? Merck. You remember Merck? Danny Merck. Yeah. He's talking glasses. He used to climb buildings like a Spider-Man. It's crazy. He used to climb any brick building. I think he died. Then he died. No, he fell off of a building. He's another guy. Look like he's combed his hand with a camera. Yeah, exactly. His hand was fucked up and had these little bottle glasses. Yeah, yeah. But that motherfucker was a solid dude. He f*cking stabbed three quarter reasons for him. But wait, he did it was crazy. Now, let me ask you a question so you can really get this party started. Tell me that you lived on 26th with all those animals. I lived on 27th in Kennedy right off the right off Kennedy Boulevard. So you did but you hung out with those savages down there. Yeah, I used to what Liberty Avenue, we used to say going down to Liberty. But you didn't go to 26th Street for the projects down there. You go to 26th where the Puerto Ricans are? I used to stand with the Puerto Ricans on Central. Yeah, Central Avenue. If you go over down that 26th Street. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where Alex Cobb hommed me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, no, down 26th. That was great, MIT. See, they lived there. Alex Cobb, a great guy. Maria and I worked in Tama Cairns together. And she had a hot ride. I think it was her brothers. And she'd let me drive it once. I was like, I flipped onto a spindle wheel. I was like, what are you doing to my car? Man, you spend all the other gas. You're burning out the tires. Great girl, Maria. I still hit Maria and go, it's never too late. We could still do this. And when she comes to my shows, I tell her, Maria, let's go. She's great. Hey girl. Let's go to Cuba. Big, like her brothers. Oh, really? Oh, she's big. Yeah. Oh, we called and all of us. Nice girl. Nice girl. Yeah, you still hang out down there. You remember they had, you remember they moved all those people out. Remember one point? I don't, on 26th Street. No. Louis Arias. You remember Louis Arias? Yeah. You still hang out Louis Arias, Martin Sito, David. We, you know, you know, Chanel, remember Jim Chanel? No. Jim Chanel, he used to live, he used to live on 20 years. I look like Alfred, I was like, yeah, oh, he's got Dean LaPree. Oh, Dean LaPree, oh, the brothers, yeah. And the Percocino brothers, the one that just died. That was down there, that was, like North Bergen had all these neighborhoods, 26, and they all took them themselves. But that neighborhood down there was off the chain. Yeah. Because they would always battle Union City on Halloween and go up there with fucking, oh my God. Socks with flour and eggs and shit. And mischief night. Oh, it was hard down there. That was mischief neighborhood. But the thing I remember the most was the light bulb company. Doritast. Doritast. Yeah. They used to throw their light bulbs out and all their bulbs, like if they were defected and Juan Ali, the Ali brothers, Juan and the other brother, I remember the brother. I remember that Lee, Juan and Carlos. They used to go to Hookah houses when they went to sixth grade. Oh my God. There you go. Yeah. I got to go to piss. But when I come out, we're going to finish the story. There you go. They were in the sixth grade and their dad would take them to the city and they would come back on Monday like people like, I went to the cinema. I went to roller skate and he's like, man, we got a dick sucked by some black girl for 10 bucks. And you're like, what the fuck? And we'll take a break. But how does this relate to light bulbs? Because they did it right on the table. They stole the light bulb plates. Okay. We would jump the garbage can, take the light bulbs out and beat each other up. Everybody had home white because they had white powder in it from the fluorescent. Everybody had fucking white powder on them every night. Juan Ali, he was the one the first guy that talked to me about girls. They're nitty gritty. They're nitty gritty. But you got to do these fucking hookers and. Oh, man. Yeah. So we had a kid McKinley, one solo. I don't remember. Good looking Cuban kid. He got a girl pregnant. He quit school in the seventh grade. The seventh grade? I got to go. I got to go. I didn't even kiss anybody in the seventh grade. Take a break. What's happened, beautiful people? I don't know if you know this, but this episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. December is all about getting comfortable. Therapy is a great, a great way to bring yourself some comfort that never goes away. BetterHelp is 100% online so it's easy to use and your therapist will be there for every step along the way through video calls, phone calls, or messages. Listen, I'm doing great now. I'm at peace. My anxiety levels are low. Why? Because I had BetterHelp about a year ago and they gave me some exercises and now I'm doing a lot better. So do yourself a favor. Just fill out a quick survey to get started and to get matched with a licensed therapist. Listen, if you don't like your therapist, you could switch them at any time at no additional cost, but you're going to love BetterHelp. Find comfort this December with BetterHelp. People struggle through the holidays. Me too. 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Save on the perfect gift by visiting Aura Frames.com to get 35% off, or is best-selling Carver Matte Frames by pressing in code Joey, J-O-E-Y. That's Aura Frames.com promo code Joey. This deal is too good just for church listeners, so get yours now in time for the holidays. Merry Christmas and show support to the show and get 35 hours off Aura's Carver Matte Frames. Use code Joey. We're back, bitches. So what happened with the Ali Brothers? No, one Ali, he's the first guy that talked to me about girls. But the nitty gritty, what to do, how to do it, so how does it count? What grade were you in, do you think? I was in grammar school. I was in grammar school. And that's like an up to fifth grade? Six, I know I met him in the sixth grade, and every weekend him and his brother, and he was on the level. His brother was not all there. He got in there with a rock. It was something because he wasn't all there. And one day we were outside at his house. A bunch of us, Martin, Julie, Martin's cousin of the night, got arrested so, and we were throwing light bulbs. And they were throwing shit at me, and I was on the roof. So I took a rock, and I threw it up in the air. I just drew it up in the air. And all of a sudden I hit. I was like, "Oh!" And it hit the younger one who wasn't all there. Yeah. And he had a big lump on his head with a blood thing. And he just got up like, "No, I'll take a soda." You know, "I'll take a soda. I'll take a soda." No, 26. He was a great place to hang out. That was a great place to hang out. We had so much fun there. It was unbelievable. Mischief night. Nothing exists like mischief night now with the eggs and the flour. You know what, they're one year? I was on Cuban. I don't know about the white flour. I put the real, like, not the kernels, but the yellow flour. It doesn't get powder. And you hit someone over the heads, I hit them over the head with a rock. So that's what I put in it. I had no clue. I had no clue. I don't know if you were there that night. We were all stuck on, had to be 76, 75. We were all stuck on buying glue and then writing your initials on a tree and lighting them on fire and then blowing it out. Everybody was doing it. You go up and down, 26, because that's funny. You said, "West New York got no trees." When you went up and down, fucking North Bergen, they got all these trees on 26th, and they planted new ones in the middle. And one night we're coming home from somewhere in Martinville. I'm going to put mine. So me and Julie and maybe you, somebody out. There was a couple of us. We're sitting there, watching him on the steps, like a lookout. And he's putting MP. And all of a sudden, he looks at us, he goes, "Yeah." And he lights the fucking initials, but he goes, and there's like a tree, right? There's like a tree. And the limb is catching up fire. And he's, there's Martin's hitting it with his hand and going, "I got Martin. It's over." And the four Martin could put this thing out. A little fucking fire truck came, like a little inspector and threw him on the floor. We were... Is he still in jail? Who had a Martin or... Martin's in North Carolina. A good kid. Really good kid. But at some point, at some point in the 70s, just before I moved to Union City, they had everybody move out of 26th Street, because they wanted to renovate all those buildings. All that's right. And everybody had to move out. And they killed, they killed the vibe. Then it was dead. There were no kids around anymore. Then they started doing Section 8 and all that kind of stuff, and there were no kids around anymore. So all everybody, that's Martin's, he had to move down, Louis Ariaga moved down, these... The brothers moved down. Everybody moved out. Everybody left. And there were no kids there. For years, the place was vacant. They were fixing up all their apartments. Anyway, I remember I was devastated. I was devastated when that happened. I can't even remember them cleaning that out. Even like when I drive by Center 4, Center 4, Tom's, Tom's Diner. Tom's Diner, man. Oh, I just told my son, I had the... Oh my God, Tom's Diner. This is little place right in the corner 27 between 27th and 28th Street. I have my first cheeseburger there. You know how much it cost? 64 cents for deluxe. And it came with fries and a drink with a second drink. 64 cents. And it was an expensive burger then. I couldn't believe it. 64 cents. How did they get the 4 cents? I don't know. 64 cents. That would piss me off. My dad, we lived in that building there where Tom's Diner was. In my dad, and my dad was the super. When he came from Cuba, he was the super there, and he was the dishwasher at Tom's. And then eventually he bought Seaglothra and Theocha, whatever. It's called Seaglothra, whatever. And then he started by, you know, he got the bars and the buildings and stuff like that. You lived across the street from Lorde's Ramos. Yes. And I'll never forget. I was talking to my mother's one telling you about being Cuban. Like some people could take it. Some people can't. I went over to Lorde's house like on a Saturday night and everybody was okay. We were gonna some dance or something. And her mother was there. And her mother was dressed up. She wasn't the best-looking woman you ever seen, but she was nice people. But she was nice people. And your mom always said, "Clada, clada, clada." And I said, "Oi, clada, tardanganchi." "Oi, clada, tardanganchi, basa de tenochi." And two days later, Lorde's like, "You're not allowed in my house, no more." What does that mean? Like, I don't know. What does angancha mean? Like, you're ready. You're hot. You're hot. You're hot. You're looking for a fucking victim. Tardanganchi means, "I got the hook up." You know what I'm saying? Lorde's and her sister, Iris, they're in social media. I follow Iris a lot. Really? She's a great girl. They're both of them, great people. And her mom, I loved her mom to death. Love her mom. Her mom made the best espresso in North Bergen by far. And she made this white rice with a little Sajita. What do you call that? Yeah. The yellow rice? Yeah. Oh my gosh. She made the best. That's fucking great. That's poverty food for Cubans. But it was great. Yellow with little hotdogs in it, those little links and shit. You put a little sauce in that motherfucker and you make believe it's a lobster tail, you're like, "I want to go back. Well, Lorde, we used to hang out. You remember McKinley School, when you came down the ramp, coming down from the bridge. It's a little ramp. There's a little wall there before the gym. Right next to where the gym is. We used to sit there and used to use to hang out with us there. And he turned me on to Richard Pryor. It was always imitating Richard Pryor and the honeymooners. The honeymooner, I had no idea what honeymooners are and Richard Pryor, you were always doing rough grand. Fuck you. Always, always, always. And Richard Pryor had us in stitches crying and Lorde's was there. David was there. My tinsito and myself and a bunch of other people. You know, I remember that clear as this as though it was yesterday. Do you remember any of the, because he, he on the podcast for years, we're talking about loving Richard Pryor. I love that he just started. The thing where Richard Pryor as a vampire, the whole skit is a vampire. He's still to a T. That's right. That's right. Oh my god. There was no one that's funny. There was no one that's funny. I can tell you that 100%. Now, because I'm here with him, there was no one funnier than Coca-Cola. And you're saying that even after he dropped the weights on your head, even then, even, no, after the weights, I laughed. I told the story with when we reconnected years ago, when we reconnect, I tell my, I've been with my wife almost 27 years. I've told that story a hundred times about the weights. And I, and I know that he's fucking God was just laughing. Just laughing. The karate guy was getting T. He was just looking at us like, what just happened? The whole weight fell on my head. He's just laughing. He's supposed to be spotting me. I wasn't, I wasn't strong, you know? It was crazy. We had no gym class in McKinley to make me stronger. We were talking about Hernandez. I don't want to talk to motherfuckers about Hernandez. Hernandez was on 28th in Bergenheim. Yeah. Right, right by the thing there. And then this was open till about three. Look, my hands get itchy. Just thinking about fucking Hernandez. And then this was open till about three or four. I don't even know when it closed down. I don't know. Maybe the mid 80s. I thought he had two sons that took it over. He had those two big boys. Like everybody always tells me how good Cuban sandwich ours are now. Go to this place, go to this place. This one's got pepperoni. Listen, the way that wasn't, we don't look at me. I didn't tell you about pepperoni. It's just no pepperoni, Cuban sandwich, fucking Hernandez. You went in there and the ham and the Swiss were already on the bread. And it was packed. And it was a big one. And there was walls of just sandwich bread with the Swiss and the thing. And you come in, you right there. He had a glass in front of him. And you already had nothing. I'm a guano. And he fucking cut a piece of pork off right in front of you. None of this for you motherfuckers that want to sell a Cuban camp sandwich or a pulled pork. I'll fucking kill you. I'll fucking kill you. Okay. That's not, there's no pulled pork. Motherfucking bullshit. So right or wrong, he's fucking jerk off. You had the Cuban, I wouldn't eat your fucking Cuban. You're fucking from Ireland. Why would I mean, you know, they were all pulled pork. This guy would slice white meat pork. And then he had the fucking ham to give it even more flavor. And he'd take a fucking paintbrush, brush that motherfucker with butter and put it in there. And then you tell him to make you a wadap. Well, that's sugar cane juice with fucking tons of ice. Are you fucking kidding me? That was the real deal. Do you have Lucy? Do you know a place Joe has been teasing me for years. I used to, I'm still fat, but I used to be a lot fatter. He's been teasing me with a preparata sandwich, the Cuban sandwich with the little cats on the bottom of my mouth. That's my wife's favorite. That's the best. Where do you get that? You can get a las briesas. You can get croquita, but I don't know. That's what I get all the time. My goal is breese. By Hernandez. This is one Swiss cheese tasted like Swiss cheese. Not like, now it tastes like paper. Swiss cheese tasted like Swiss cheese. It was the real deal. When he's talking about ham, it was ham. It was ham. It was the real deal with mustard and the butter. It was, oh my god, Hernandez restaurant was the best Cuban joint in all of the area. And all they had was the sandwiches. No, I don't know what they had on there. I had this, I love to brag about, they had the best and panada, you know, meat and panada. And my dad, he got a bar. He ran, he worked in a bar, so he closed down the bar. He would get it in panadas and show me up and he'd show up at the house and say, wake up. I said this mirror behind my door with some sun thing that's made of metal. And he would open the door like 3 o'clock or 3 o'clock in the morning, so I'd jump up. I had in panadas. Get up. You got to eat this with the water apple. You know, I would get up and sit in the bed and eat to wolf down 2 in panadas. I would fart all night, you know? You wake you up at 3 in the morning. I know, just thinking about it. They don't give a fuck, okay? If they come in and say my mom comes over and you got all we were sitting on the couch and we potato chips 2 in the morning. You think that lady cooked from good fellas? Tommy's mother? Shit. Shit. And I'm talking my mother would pop up a paella late night and wake me up. I fucking bullied shit. Well, I wrote every hollering. That's the shit they cooked at 3 in the morning. When you went to school, you're like, why's my house smell like fucking my mother? My mom would you had the pressure cooker to make the beans? It used to go to work. I leave the pressure cooker cooking, the beans. It used to prepare the night before, you know, I forgot my marinade. And then to leave the pressure cooker cooking, you would go to work and come back from work and finish up the beans. And then we had these fresh beans every single night, you know, with everything. My mom cooked everything. Oxtail, you know, rabbit. If it moved, she cooked it. You know, it was just, she cooked everything. But everything was delicious. And still, and to me, everything was chicken. She said, it's chicken. But what is this, mom? It's the little chicken. But she gave me everything. We had everything here. Everything. We had everything. We lived in New York. We used to get cantina. Yeah, cantina. What's that? They dropped the food off in front of your house in like little bowls stacked on each other with a thing and it's had like white rice. Me, he had a white rice. So just like a like a meal prep before meal prep? No, no, no, this was your food was cooked. It was cooked. It was cooked. It was a fucking meal prep. Yes, you had a little containers. One on top of the other with a metal thing at the top. They even, some of them even gave you a fucking Cuban coffee and a flaunt. So you have rice, you have beans, you have the meat, then you have like plantains or tomatoes or whatever, you know. Okay. And you had the whole meal for the family. You know what? Because we're talking about food. He's talked for years about Cuban Chinese food. Do you have any like, you know, Latino, Latino, that was the best. Yeah, what do you think about that? Oh, that was great. What's it? Like a balla china, 57th and burgundy. That was the best. Like a balla china. That means that Chinese fucking bell cocks. Nothing like Chino Latino nothing. Oh my God. And what would you get? Like what's your Chinese Cuban food order? Like what would you get? We got everything. You can get everything. You can get, I will get always the chicken fried rice back then. Now I don't get I now get vegetable fried rice. You know, I'm more modern fried rice, but then you can get it with plantains, sweet plantains. Yeah. And then you can get a bite, no, no, no, no, no, bite, plantains. What's that breaded steak? Brite steak. Like a skirt steak by breaded. I used to get the pork chop with the pork fried rice, an egg wall, and some tortonas. Oh, tortonas. You got that only a year ago when he went, for how you're making me hungry. Oh, no, I Chino Latino was, you know, Latino was fucking the real. And then we had the other side of the coin. We had this place, the Polynesian place, and Kennedy Boulevard. My guy. My guy. Tremendous. The food killed you. They finally closed it down. They found cats. They caught them cooking cats. No, don't tell me that. They were hanging in the freezer. And they always gave you a lot of grass with the food because there's a cemetery in the back. They would just go back there. What does he want? Yeah. I got it. And he'd just take a handful of grass, whether the cat pissed on it or whatever. I fucking cats. They were feeding cats. You can't tell me that. They will. He's been saying, I just moved to New York and like, I am a little scared to get a chance. I don't want to eat cat. You can smell it. You can smell it. You can smell it. You see the kids smell like. It smells like the kids tears. But I swear to God, they caught them cooking cats several times. Several times. They finally closed them down. Who would go after the first time? They couldn't help them. Bro, they had an all you could eat. That you just went in there, closed your eyes and pray for the best. Okay. They gave you spare ribs. Cats. They caught them in half. And you could pick up the thing. I remember one day we were picking up the thing and the guy's like, no, no. Yeah, I don't think you were supposed to pick up. Go. We had so much. Now I remember where there was a fucking a go-go bar. Yeah, it was on 32nd Street right off from the new stand. Yeah, that's in the late 70s. There was like a burlesque bar. And I would go up there to get my mother. My mother would trick up in the afternoon. I'm like, what the fuck? Union City has so many. Union City had the transfer station downtown. That's where the old trolleys used to turn around and come back up town. The whole area was full of clubs, nightclubs, cabarets, and everything. Bird Lancaster worked down there as a dishwasher. What's the name? Deborah Harry worked down there as a waitress at one point. Now, Deborah Harry and Pat Baddattar shot a movie in Union City. Yeah, Union City. Called Union City. Holy shit. Right on Summit Avenue, there's a building in the corner Summit in 18th Street. That's where they shot it. And that apartment building. Crazy. And speaking of Union City, were you ever like, do you remember Joey's mother's bar? Were you around for that? I was around. I was around. I didn't frequent it. My dad owned bars as well. Right. Like, I fell out. Yeah. So all the Cuban, all the Cuban proprietors knew each other. They were like, they were like gangsters. I was gonna say, was it like, was there like a war? Did you guys hate each other or you guys? No, no, no, no. But he was at my house. My mother was there that day when he got hit with the barbell. Oh, okay. Yeah, that was no. We all worked together. Everybody was friends. There was a guy on 33rd Street. His name was Boyo Triti. And he had a bar. I mean, sad pussy. That's way before a big pussy. That was 77. Everybody called him Boyo Triti. And then that whole area there was fucking tremendous. And I was telling Lucy on the phone day at night where when my mother had the first restaurant was across from Union Hill 38. 38. There's a little refrigeration. And on the corner now with some medical supply. But in that, that was that was fucking the hottest corner because you had carbell on the corner. Next to it was the bottom of the barrel. Yeah. Okay, the bottom of the barrel is the real fucking deal. That was beautiful in that place. If you read Henry Hill's book, he talks about the bottom of the barrel. He was at the bottom of the barrel. We used to stop in Union City and get a drink at the bottom of the barrel. And on top of that was food job, PyCon food, which is probably probably still there. But then when you I remember that and if you walk towards Kennedy, there was like a pharmacy because one day they were loading a truck and we robbed it like in the sixth place. We robbed one of the little boxes. It was a box of condoms. And we didn't know bro. We were like 10 and we all had condoms. We tried to sell them, get out of here with the thing. Everybody had condom in their wallet. They have a lot of condom in their wallet. Nobody used to condom. Nobody used, you know, not. It was just to talk about it. I'm not there was when you make out with a chicken shit. Oh my God. What did you think of Joey's mom? I don't think I've met anybody else who knew new Joey's mom. Very, you know, typical Cuban mom. Really cool. Yeah, the way I remember like really, really nice. I walked in very friendly. The bar was great, man. Well, even just in general, just like, I mean, I guess George, maybe you knew his mom didn't know. No, I think you're the first person I met. You got to understand Cuban parents like my dad, my dad, my stepdad with my stepdad. He was a tough guy or a suit, you know, always carried the whole bed. He'll pistol whip anybody in a sack. No, he will come home a lot of times. My mom cleaning him up or cleaning up or throwing out the suit, you know, pistol whipping this and that because you have to be really tough. You know, there's no, no kidding. But at the same time, he would show up in the middle of the night, not only with him, but not remember one night specifically. I mean, I'm asleep. I mean, school. I mean, high school. He brought a cat from the street, a black cat. He threw it on top of me in the bed. You're sleeping. You're a teenager. Something throws a cat on you. That's the kind of stuff he would do. One day, we have like a Christmas party. My aunt is coming this and that. We had a little apartment and everybody say, having a good time. He shows up with a homeless guy, Napoleon. What's his name? I'll never forget Napoleon. He brought him over to have Christmas with us. A homeless guy. That's the type of guy he was, you know. So there was this tough, out of people, but sweetheart. So you asked me about Joey's mom. Right. She's probably, when she has to be at the bar, she's probably tough as nails. But at home, she was a mom. She was a mom. She was a mom. And she loved these guys. Anybody who came over, she always fed, um, but everybody got on. There was no macaroni and cheese. My mom will give you a brand new steak. What a fucking box. You didn't eat, you didn't eat like, you know, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all these days. Did you like other Cuban kids? Like, not more, but like, was it like special when a Cuban kid came over? Yes and no. I like everybody to come over. No, I know you would, but. And those times you want old people's houses and they feed you and drive you to places. Yeah, every fucking crazy. I remember, man, I live in 27th Street in the corner. I play baseball up on 64th Street in North Bergen. My mom will give me whatever, a quarter, 30 cents to take the bus. Number one. Yeah. Number one. And that was me with, you know, my, my, my, uh, borrowed, uh, cleats and my glove taking the bus by myself, crossing the boulevard by myself. This, you know, nine, 10 years old driving, you know, get right in the bus all the way up by myself, crossing the street again, playing baseball, coming home. There was no like bottled water like kids, you know, you go play, my son goes play soccer now. He has a gator in one side, a bottle of water on the other side. But two different pairs of shoes in his bag and a fucking bag to carry. We have nothing. We have nothing. We have nothing. We have nothing. No, there was a house that was golden. All this water shit about dehydration. We would have died 50 fucking years ago. It's all bullshit. Let pain dehydration, rusty water. I don't know what these fucking bad. I feel dehydrated. How do you feel fucking dehydrated? It's 90 degree. You think your grandfather stopped doubles for some fagging kid? Nobody was dying back then, right? No, no, no. Every year now, somebody died. Oh, it was too hot. Nobody was fucking dying. They were running fucking 76 street elves. Okay. So get your shit together. Feed your kid. What are you supposed to anymore? You know, by if you came over to one of our houses to eat, you wouldn't get like a peanut butter. No, I'd say the rice and beans, a steak, you know, a chicken steak, whatever. Yeah, I'd go to go. Yeah, sure. I'd go to go. And then I didn't realize how like you guys were in the same spot. And I'm not trying to get you to incriminate anyone in your family. But Joey's talked for years about like the numbers and like doing that. Everybody did the numbers. Everybody. Everybody. They did the numbers rocket. And in the bars, they did, I think called Charada. It's a gambling game. The gambling game where everything, everything, every number is associated with a saint or with something with a Chinese Chinese thing. Yeah, I have the list. Every bar, every bar, they played it. And everybody turned their heads. Wow. And all these owners, everybody carried, you know, everybody carried, everybody took care of each other. There was only, I remember one, one guy in the three towns that my dad said, that's a Chewato. A what? A Chewato. A rat. Well, okay. A Chewato. That's the one nobody wanted to deal with. And he was Cuban. He was Cuban. Yeah. He goes, Oh, I don't like that guy. That's a Chewato. He'll, he'll write, he'll write you out. One guy, but everybody, everybody got along. Everybody did the numbers rack. Everybody did Charada. Did you ever win the numbers? Huh? Did you ever win the number? Me? Yeah. No. I played it twice. My dad won a bunch of times. One time I went to Washington, Union Hill to play in the rec league. And I was on a purple team and they gave me the thing and they had number 57. And I walked in the house and my mom was like, what's that number? What did you get that shirt from? I got it from, you know, 57. Put the number in front of the day. Oh, five. She called $10,000. $10. I won five. She gave me 2,500. And then on my birthday, I hit my birthday in 1979. I had 219. Wow. I went to Jersey City to watch a movie. And when I came back, they told me. And all those cats, there was a, there was a bookmaker in Union City that was the best. His name was Nado. Dokambo. Yeah. He sat at my mother's bar. He was about five foot nine, 220, but his stomach was all the way out. And he would just sit in like one of those chairs. And at three o'clock, he left because that's when the bank closed. Three o'clock is when you can't take numbers, no more. The number comes out like a four. So he would stay there from eight in the morning to three, drinking and fucking making comments. And he was the guy right now that if he was alive, he'd be in jail because he talked to me and my friends like we were adults. Like if we were 10, we walked in, oh, you're coming. You get your dicks up yet. I'm the model I've been got. I just want to play dominoes. I came over to play Monopoly with this fucking dude. Every time you saw him, he said something sexual to you. He wasn't a pedophile, not at all. Well, he was fucked up, but he would always ask you, did you get your dicks up yet? Are you pissing sweet yet, but Mal in Duluth said, he would always. But the best was I saw Matt 30th. And what's the street? All right. So this is Bergen line 20 30th street chappiece florist. Yeah, Patterson Plank Road. If I go down the next corner, he used to be a bar there. Be gentle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. New York County. That's New York County. Okay. That used to be a bar home by Teddy Marcuniac. He played for the Chicago Bulls out of Union City. He died from drinking and Duke could drink for fucking days. But I forgot what I was gonna tell you what we talking about. The guy talking sexual to you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We went in there to play a number one day. And I went in there with a kid named Darren Rago, God rest his soul. We're about 18 at the time now. And Rago liked him. There was two instances of Rago, one incident. He was sitting at the bar in the corner. And he had two young girls with him like that, 25 Cuban girls talking to him. And Rago goes, ask him if he wants to smoke pot. So this motherfucker's like, yeah, I smoke. You're full. I never saw a smoke pot. He said, you're full. You're full. I have been cool. I used to smoke pot and Cuba. One of those guys. He's, you know, Cubans, like I remember going to see Bruce Lee movies and going back to my mother's bar. And the guys would sit there and they go, where'd you come from? I went to see a Bruce Lee movie. That guy's a punk. I beat him up in Cuba. Like three years ago, and I lose my mind. What are you fucking talking about? Nobody beats up Bruce Lee. He's a fucking pussy. I smacked them right on the corner on 58th Street one time. And you would fucking die. Like they, they're just lying to you. They're just breaking your balls. And that's what they do. That's a sense of humor. So the one time we're in there, get a full mouth. He goes, you're not full. He didn't want to smoke that side. He wanted to smoke on the bar. And it was like a chocolate tie on a big bamboo. And we kept giving it to him. But he was trying to impress the young girls. And he's like, yeah. And they didn't even know what he was saying. He didn't know what they was there. He's smoking. And finally, the girls didn't want to smoke no more. And the joint kept going to him. He's trying to give it away. And I was like, no, no. And he kept smoking it, dog. And he passed out. And then I went in there like a month later and he goes, oh, yeah, get down. And I said, I walk away. What was in that week? He goes, I couldn't feel my legs for four days. And then that day, he told us that I'll never forget this Lucio. He told us that he went home that night. And he jerked off and it was so fucking good. And I go, what are you talking about? My wife was in the shower. Rico. And he had a chair. Well, they say, can't we go? You know, they're fucking crazy. And he goes, ah, ah, he was in the chair at a bar telling me and a bunch of North Bergen kids. How he jerked off the night before. And he's like making noises, ah, get Rico. And when he came, he goes, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. But his check goes back. He's like, bah, bah, bah, bah. And don't say make a little needle. Just went right to sleep and we're like, this is terrible. What the fuck is this? And that's a sense of humor. Yeah. I think that Cuban sense of humor helped me later on in life. That little, that little quick thinking like those fucking Cubans just, you know, I remember that this should be a fat lady. I lived across the street from my house in North Bergen later on before my mother died. She was a flat black Cuban lady. Right, right. And whenever my mother would cook, she would come over. And my mother would be watching the yanking game and the black chick would go on the kitchen. And my mother would go, oh, yeah, go and die. Hey, fat fuck. Oh, my God. Get your fingers out of the pot. I could feel them from here. Like they just have a weird sense of fucking humor. Yeah. That little twist on things, they don't, they have no filter. No filter. That's me. No filter. They don't give a fuck. And when they say something, they say it loud. They're my son. They're that we're having dinner. He says to, he says to me, he turns around, how come every time we talk to a Cuban, you talk so loud, I said, I don't talk like, yeah, every time I know when you're talking to someone Cuban, because you're decibel level, it's like a thousand times higher. I don't know why. I don't know why we do that. It's the house. So when you quit acting, when you said that said, what did you decide to do? No, what happened was, it was a segue. You know, I had gone, I had gone off my, my tour. I did the 40th anniversary revival West Side Story, supposed to come to Broadway. We went to LA, Cheetah Rivera came out, the old, old West Side Story people came to see us, and we were supposed to come to Broadway after LA. They decided to close down the company, because they said, well, we, we, we made our money back after the first month. We sold that everywhere, made a lot of money. So they, we were on tour for two years. So they were making profit. We were using this, this old set from a previous production, you know. So they said, well, we have all these equity guys here, making all this money, you know, making residuals on the commercials. Let's just close down the tour and take it out non-union, which they did. They took, so now we will make an X amount of dollars, and they get a small percentage of that. They can give them all old costumes, because, you know, if you're an equity member, you have to get all new costumes, or custom made, custom made shoes, custom made everything, but the non-union guys don't get any of them. They get nothing. They travel by bus, you know, no days off. You know, well, we had to have one, you know, golden day to rest and all that kind of stuff, you know, you do commercials. So we were making not only two grand a week back then, and I'm talking about that early 90s, two grand a week plus per diem plus you making the residuals on the commercial. So you're doing, you're doing okay for young guys, single, whatever. So I get, I get off the tour with a close down the tour because they want to go nine union, so they can make more money. So I get off the tour, and I go do something at Westbury, Music Fair, and at the Palace Theatre, and I just, I met my wife. I got off the tour two days later, I met my wife. And I said, man, this girl is beautiful. American girl, blue eyes, blonde, gorgeous. I was like, oh my God, you're stacked. So I'm over there. My agent calls me up. They want you to go back out on tour with Westside for another year. And course line wants you to go out on tour course. I met St. Hamilton was the choreographer. I said, I'm done. I can't go out on tour. I'm done. I'm staying home. So I stay home. And that's when I started working at Spanish Rep and I was still signed with internet, ICM for commercials and stuff. So I was doing the commercials trying to do the soaps and I started working at Spanish Rep and I stayed with my wife. So what happened was I met, I started writing, I had a newspaper and I had a local TV show with a friend of mine that worked at ABC because I remember I worked and I was working on all my children as an orderly. And this guy was a stage manager on, on, on ABC and a system director on the news program back then. So he had a local TV show. So I got involved with him. And we do, we talk about politics. I knew nothing about politics. I just had a note. I was very opinionated. And I had a newspaper. I started a newspaper. I was writing all kinds of opinions. I mean Brian Stack. And we hit it off. Hit it off. And I started helping him out. We're doing events and stuff like that because I was good at coordinating events. And, and then he asked me if I wanted to come in. At first I was like, you know, you know, I'm, you know, I'm an actor. Yeah, I'm not a government guy. And he goes, no, I really wanted to come in, became friends. And he brought me, I was the first director he brought in. And the rest is history. I've been there for, what, 24 years? And you're the entertainment director? I'm a commissioner. I came in as a director over at the Department of Public Affairs, which ran six departments. I came in as that. And then three years later, he asked me to be a commissioner to run the commission. It's a commission for more government. We have five commissioners, everybody votes for the commissioners. And then between us, we choose who the mayor is going to be. But we always know who the mayor is, you know, Brian, you know. And he asked me to be a commissioner. He goes, everybody likes you, you get along with everybody, whatever. And so I came in as a commissioner. I was bilingual. You know, I knew the town, I grew up in town. I loved the town, all that kind of stuff, you know. And I became, I became a commissioner. Slowly, I started giving up acting and producing more documentary, short films and stuff like that. And then that's how eventually I just gave up acting. My wife said to me, I'm still a segment where I pay, I pay my dues. I pay my dues today. I paid them late. I paid them late. I was supposed to pay me in the spring. I paid the spring and the, and the fall now. And so she's, she's complained to me, because I got to pay whatever 30 something dollars, you know, fee for being late or whatever, for 60 bucks. I said, I just pay for just in case I want, one day I want to do something, you know, because you never know, you never know. No, they call you all the time. I segway, I segway into, into what I do now, which I love, you know, I love what I do. It's a great town. I love the town. I love working with Brian and I love my fellow commissioners of great, great people. The town looks fucking good. You know, no matter what you say about Union City, if you go back, and people can say, Oh, you know, it was this, was that it was, and it was great. You didn't see the growing up in Union City was great. We had a mix of people. I love the people. I love, I love that I came from there. But man, the things that Brian's done with all the new schools and new roads and new parks, no matter what you say, it's there. You can see it. You can see it. That, that beautiful high school with the stadium on top, you see the progress. So no matter what you say, if you go back, none of that existed. Well, I went to that Obama school. You sent me that thing. To the kick my shot. Yeah, yeah. You sent me down to Obama's on 16th Street. No, that was Colin Powell. Colin Powell. Colin Powell. Fucking beautiful. Yes, beautiful school. And that area down. I mean, listen, I'm sad that St. Michael's is gone. Yeah. Holy Rosary's gone. I mean, we grew up on that shit. Yeah. Oh, the girls in Holy Rosary. The most beautiful girls in town from Holy Rosary. Oh my god. I don't know. A couple of them from North Bergen. I still talk to one of them. God. The most beautiful girls came from Holy Rosary. Bunch. I used to date an Irish redheaded girl in Union City. I was in love. I was in love. And we used to hold hands and go get pizza on New York Avenue at that pizza place. Oh my god. But I still remember going to fucking Judo class on Stavin Street. I still remember seeing that Tony. San Antonio is the best. That's why I went to see all the karate films. Yeah. The old christian films. It was English films with Spanish subtitles were the other way around. No, they did everything. They did everything. And they only had a wig. That's what I remember as a kid. Yeah. Is he still alive? Tommy is still alive. Yeah, Tony. Yeah. He's still alive. He's a super nice guy. And does he have the movie theater still? No. No, he owns it, especially Alito. And he's a chairman of Save Line America. But I just don't deal today. I was in a party with him. He's a super nice guy. He still dresses to the tee. And he's got the hair, the white hair and stuff. Oh my god. A couple of years ago, he got a little bit old. But now he's doing good. He's doing good. He's a really good guy. So he's doing, you know, he started, he had a furniture store. I think in my hand. Then he opened up a furniture store in Jersey. And then he bought San Antonio. And San Antonio was a huge and eventually sold it when the movie's died out in the city. And then he went into Lespecialito. No, first he got into, what's that newspaper, Oi, or whatever? He used to be the biggest Hispanic guy on the planet side. No, that's not around. No, no, that's not. But Oi, I think it was Oi was the biggest Hispanic newspaper in the country. And he owned that. And he sold it for a lot of money. And then he started Lespecialito. Lespecialito made a ton of money. So he's a really really cool guy, a character. He's a real character. Well, that's what, you know, even like beside the Cubans, fucking what's his name? And his office there. The guy from the mob and the Genevieve's crime family. Oh my god. Yeah, the mob had an office? Yeah, I can't sum it. Why did he have an office? Because it's a great place to have an office. The Teamsters. The Teamsters building. Oh, okay. The Teamsters building. So it wasn't like he just had an office to do mob shit. He was a Teamster. No, he was a Teamster. Oh, okay. But they used to be an Italian bakery on a 22nd essential. Holy shit. That was great. That was great. I stayed in 26. When I got back to North Bergen, I think like six months, maybe three months into the sixth grade. I didn't like living in my house. I didn't like that. My mom come home late. I heard fucking spirits. We were talking about all the ghosts in North Bergen and the Indians and shit. And one day I said, I'm not doing this no more. And I moved up with my friends on 26th and Central. And I would wake up. I'd go to 22nd for the breakfast from the bakery. I'd get a bag of zeppoles. And then a fucking big thing of Italian bread with hotel bar butter. And I'd kill that. And then as I got old, I would just meet Dean LaPreet. And we'd go to Tom's diner. And I always got the toasted corn muffin. God. Damn. Was fucking on the grill with extra butter and shit. You know, Tom McCann, that's Santa Ford. I remember when they used to do punt pass and kick them. Oh my god. Santa Ford played. I don't care. People about punt pass and fucking kick. It was great. And it would be packed. Packed with bunch of fucking North Bergen savages, you know, city. Elbows all ripped up, knees ripped up. I mean, I was always ripped up. It was great. I mean, oh, bloodied in the whole bed. And we never never remember that we were David and stuff. Tell us David. We used to play two hand touch. We became full tackle on the on the blacktop with snow. Oh my god. You were all ripped up. I would get home. I wasn't different. These kids. No. No. And I'm not accepting it. No. And you remember, you remember the swamps? Fuck. Yeah. Swamps. We used to go to swamps and steal fucking those things to light to the mosquitoes. Yeah. Remember punks, whatever the fuck that is. Where is the swamp? It's gone. Now it's old. It's the swamps that will build up this hotels and shit. Goddamn it. Where is the fucking swamp? Where was it? It's down. Okay. You remember these used to be a motel down 39th Street. Once you pass tunnel the avenue with our new buildings that we were talking about, you pass tunnel the avenue. You keep on going down before you get to the whole new development neighborhood. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. We have a half a mile down. And that's the swamps right there. That used to be old swamps where Walmart is and and all those all those box stores down. But the swamp like it went from high tunnel the avenue went from down there all the way to refuel, sir. Absolutely. Because I used to ride my motorcycle. Yeah. All the way to Ritzfield. Oh, I got a story with you. Then you have a you had a mini bike. Yeah. I almost killed myself in the mini bike. Was it his mini bike? It's his mini bike. We were hanging out at McKinley School. I think it was John Bender, David, you and me were hanging out and you had your little mini bike. And I never got on one. I said, get on it. And go, come on. So I got on the mini bike and I went down. There was a blue stone wall coming down the you remember that ramp coming down the ramp blue stone wall right there. I almost like totaled that wall. I'd make the curve. I almost killed myself. Never. That was the last time I got on a bike. The last time I got on a motorbike. I don't blame you. I thought it was going to die. I had no control. I can't believe I turned the wheel and I loved my motorcycles. Doug, I had like eight of them. And then I fell and my mother sold it before I got back from the hospital. Cuban mom don't even play. She took a loss on it. I took like a three-hour loss on it. I don't even get the three-hour loss. She just said, no ma. That's it. Quickly. No, no, no family meeting. Kids have a nice, they have one, they have nice lunches, breakfast, they have breakfast in school, lunches. We had me remember, McKinley School, the little counter. It was eight inches. He wasn't even a full foot. It was eight inches in the basement going a gray. It was painted gray with that cement paint. Yeah, you remember? Battle shift. All the way across the basement, you know? And we ran track there. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. And we got a milk, we got a smoked juice, we got a soggy tuna. And sometimes on Apple, you're lucky. Mrs. Sabatino. Anthony's mother was the cookie lady. She used to always give me an extra. Man, that tuna, man. Nowadays, I go, I think about the things that affect you and your kid. The kind of tuna that I, the way I want the tuna to taste nowadays is the way we hate used to have. McKinley. Yeah, me too. It's crazy. Me too. I love it. I fucking love it. You know, like Jim, you talked about Barone with that. Yeah. I had a class right here. Forget who what class that was. I forget why I was facing the window. I don't know if it was aggressors, class, whatever, in the first in the basement. We saw that, you remember when they built the holiday in? Yes. Okay. So they started building the gym like a year before the holiday. They finished the holiday in two years before they finished out gym. Two years? That gym was. The construction money was just getting lost. Jesus. It took like three years to build a gym. It was a box. Oh, yeah. And the meantime, they took away a block top in the back. You remember? Yeah, it's just a black top on the back. It's crazy. Fucking crazy. Do you still remember Carmine? Yeah, frankly, I'm ranking it me up there. I got to give him a call. Give me up for Thanksgiving. I just sent them a text. Yeah, one of the special brothers died there. Yeah. So you remember Dominic and all those guys? Yeah, man. You were there. Dominic was. I've been trying to think like when the last time I saw you was like McKinley because after McKinley, a lot of kids disappeared. A lot of kids just Martin and I bumped into Martin for 30 years later to Miami and Brown. He came to see me. Because you remember me? I never forgot you. I hung out with his uncle. Yeah, he was a nice guy. We're friends on Facebook, whatever. Somehow we reconnected David. David, I haven't seen him forever. He called me at one point in my office and I never called him back. I got a call. He's a good guy. He called me at these back in town this week. There's a good guy. He's a good guy. All those guys are still fucking very decent. Especially all those guys were really cool. We were lucky, man. Listen, when you tell these stories to people, they look at you and they go, "He comes from a land that didn't exist." Listen, I just moved back. I went to North Bergen a couple of times. I looked around. It's my hometown. It's where I grew up. But that thing we had there is lost. That's what I said to him. It wasn't North Bergen. It was a state of time. It was a state of mind. It was a state of mind for... All those teams were great then. Union Hill had a great football team, a fucking basketball team. Memorial always had something going on. What do you call those things? Arrivaly. We didn't beat each other up by college before this week. But there was always a rivalry. It was just different. Now, some of these systems only have programs, though. I don't know if my kids don't play in the street anymore. In the corner '27s, I grew up in that little corner, but where Ludisson, he almost lived. Oh my god, that was you, Arias. Yeah, Mario, Mario, Mario. Pancho. Pancho, Pancho. A bunch of us were there. I grew up in '38. But there's a party on '26. That's why I'm going, Jack. Even before parties. We weren't drinking or nothing, man. We were just being fucking crazy kids, man. But we played everything in that corner. Everything. Football, football, wiffleball. Hockey. Everything. You were humble. We used to throw a ball against the wall. I remember what you used to call it. If you land a little high, it was a hit, then it was a double, triple, a home run. We hit against the wall where the liquor store was. It hit on that wall. And then David's window was right here. And sometimes we still, his window, his mom used to open. It was at Beedah. He had Beedah with his mom's name. Beedah. And Benny, Benny, his dad. You know his sister, Mimi. I spoke under a couple of times. Mimi. Where's Mimi lived? In Florida. Florida. They all went to Florida. Yeah, they're great people. It's crazy. A lot of kids we grew up with just tapped out and went to Florida. Yeah. And it's crazy. Whenever I go to perform in Miami or Florida, I always see somebody that I haven't seen. They'll come up and go, "You remember me from Union City?" I'm like, "Fuck no, but holy shit." You have a great memory. You have a great memory. No, I do. You remember everything. I can't remember. But there's some people, listen, faces. When you come to me and say, "Hey, Joey, Chipotle, I know the name, but I got to see the face." Yeah, yeah. I've seen the face in so fucking long. That, you know, I've forgotten a lot of people. You remember Ralph Carey? Fuck yeah, Elvis. Yeah. He just performed in Union City for us. Did he? Yeah. He performed in North Bergen too. He's a good guy. Good guy. He's crazy. Yeah. Crazy as catchy as when we were kids. Girlfriend wasn't the one that turned him on to doing that. Yeah. But I think he was always an Elvis fan. Yeah, I think so, right? In fact, I'm going to have Lovito on here in a couple of weeks. You're going to have him on? Mr. Lovito. Oh, okay. That's good. He was in Atlantic Islands. Oh, okay. So I was taking and putting him on here because what happened was this year in North Bergen started hitting me up on Facebook to see if I remember where they put that fucking tube. Do you remember in 1976 we put some fucking tube together? Yeah. Someone's following you. Yeah. Time capsule? Time capsule? Time capsule. Yeah. Someone contacted me on that too. Yeah. And I call the V. I don't remember. So let's get this all over with. Wait, let me call the V though. If I call the V though, I'll do this for you. It was a fucking tube because it's right in front of the grandma's school before you have to walk up those stairs. Oh, really? They put in the one that the stairs go like this. So instead of going that way, tell them how much I hide those stairs. Oh my god. You're going to McKinley. Walk up those stairs and we had a shovel those fucking stairs. So before we finish the one story I want to get your memory on it, Lucio, is the the cab company. The cab where the guy got like he was delivering stuff like delivering drugs and they killed him. No, we're talking about Robby. Oh, Robby. Oh, yeah, man. They killed that guy. Something happened. He would ratty somebody out and he was working with the cops. He was taking he was he was helping the cops take take bribes or whatever. There was something going on. There's something going on there. And they just killed him because there was so much stuff involved. There was bribes involved. There was drugs involved. There was all kinds of. I don't know. It's the same guy that we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. When I was a kid. Yeah. Okay. He was an undercover cop. He was an undercover cop, but he made a mistake. He went after the Cubans. He went after the Cubans. He tried to shake them down without authorization. Right. And he started busting his balls and he started getting a little a little crazy and I guess he went to collect the rapid autopsy one night and they just fucking drilled them. But the guy that was in the passenger seat, he's still a lot. Oh, really? And he tells the story that he couldn't get out of his seat. The bullets missed him. Wow. The bullets missed him, but I still remember going to McKinley and then acting weird. And then me getting home from McKinley and running up to my mother's bar and I walked in and there's dirty fucking Cubans. Oh, fuck. No, that's what I'm saying, but by that, you know, you got people stuck together to kill an undercover cop. And Hudson Avenue, there used to be a bar, there used to be a bar in almost every corner. Yes. Yes. Yes. Almost every corner. And everybody, each other. Yeah. Yeah, flocking the one on the corner on the other side of the corner. In fact, I saw something on YouTube the other day about that area, 57th and Hudson with up. I don't know if you remember Niko. Yeah. Or they told me they were talking about him and the whole fucking deal. But Union City just has a fucking tremendous rich history that nobody knows. You know, Brian Stack remembers everything, every one. One day he should write when he retires from being a mayor, whatever, if he ever does, I don't think he ever retires you write a whole, a whole book on this. Or he should do a film about the stuff that really happens or happened in Union City. So he has all the history down. He remembers every, he's an encyclopedia, because he's been involved with politics since muscle. So he's seen everything and everyone, you know, he's seen everything go down. And he remembers everything. He's super smart. One of the smartest people I've ever met, Brian. If you ever spoken to, he knows about everything. You're talking about football, he knows about football, talks about basketball, you know about basketball, politics, politics, law, law, he's incredible, incredible how smart he is. And he remembers everything, everything about the whole Hudson County, everything about Hudson County. The thing, the corporation, everybody should read their book pretty much. I mean, it's Celine Valdivia is a commissioner with me. He says there's a couple of things that were not accurate because Celine's family also owned bars and stuff. They Valdivia is like 10,000 of them, you know, in Union City. Yeah, if one of the first, the Valdivia is one of the first Cubans that came to Union City. And they, you know, it's like a ton of them. And he remembers everything. But the corporation read the, I almost had the English. CJ, yeah, he's gonna come in a couple of weeks because now we got a situation going on where my eighth grade teacher, Wally Lindsey, he was the mayor of Wiego. Oh, wow. And then he got with the, why is the mayor of Wiego up in teaching in an authoritarian school? You ever think about that? But everybody, everybody saw at the time now that you think about the hindsight, had something to do with that waterfront. If you really think about it. And something happened over the years and he got plugged down. So when he saw the TJ English podcast, he contacted me. And he goes, battle opened up the door. That's why they all got arrested. Not that battle was a rat. Right. He contacted his CIA people or whatever, some fucking story. And it goes all the way to what happened with Menendez last year. Something crazy. So they're gonna come on and talk about it. Who the fuck knows what it is. He's gonna bring his case on here, the whole fucking thing, and his attorney. And I'm gonna bring TJ too. And we're just gonna fucking hammer this out. I have no, I have no dog in the fight. I don't know what the fuck the arguments about, but they just want to talk about it. I don't fucking know. I don't get into those conversations. Political conversations. I don't know nothing about Union City. I know my mom had a bar there. I know some people got shot there. No, Castro was there. I know Castro was there. I saw Cher. Fred Astaire. Gallman. Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire. Dan's there. You know, I had some good fucking BLTs at the five-star I paid. I played for St. Michael's CYO, which I, till this day, I take seriously. I picked St. Michael's. I could have gone on the St. Fatima and all that shit, but I was like, I like St. Michael's. There was some about St. Michael's plus Tommy Einstein went there. And that was my boy at the time. So I got to play for St. Michael's. In fact, we're getting together with the coach from my CYO coach and fucking going to do a dinner at the four days. Oh, that's great. Steve Rubenaccio. I don't know. He was my coach there, but he had been there forever. He was a good guy. You know, he's part of the community. Steve Rubenaccio, there was another guy. Steve Achardi is something like that. People like part to the community. They were Irish. They spoke Spanish. Yeah. When you fucking Italian, you speak Spanish. I still remember sitting with him on my block and the fucking, and he worked for Rubenaccio worked for ABC for Good Morning America. So I would always call him up. When he didn't get me a job. Well, what do you think? What do you know? You don't even go to acting class. Acting class. I didn't know you had to go to acting class. And that's the last time I talked to him and he won. Wow. And I went to eat dinner one night and he was sitting at the table right across him. The coach from the same Michael's culture. We started talking and gave me his number and he goes, call me. Let's get together. So we're all going to go to dinner with Chucky and a bunch of the coaches. They could talk their problems out of him. Eddie Ford and all those fucking refs and shit. Michael's man. I went, I did catechism there. And where? And say, Michael. Oh, you did? We went to the other place. I went to say, Michael's, and I don't know why my mom sent him to St. Michael's. Because we all got to another St. Rocco's. No, I went to St. Michael's. What's the one on 30th Street? Right by the dime. 30th Street. That's a holy family. That's holy. That's holy family. You went there for catechism. Yeah, because either you went to the ecology club. Remember, you got to school one. You either picked the ecology club or catechism. I wasn't going to fucking pick up no trees. So I said, let me go hang on there. Let me go hang on with some fucking priest. And we lasted about a month and he threw us out. Like I said, Michael's, I never finished because you had the real nuns there. I couldn't take it. I said, Mom, I'm not going back. On a Saturday or Sundays, whatever day we had to go, I said, I'm done. I'm not going back there. Lucille, one more question. I know you're part of a music troupe, but I haven't seen no videos. No, no, I was I was managing after after after I stopped acting on myself and doing films. I started to manage this band called Maxi Mallet, which is the number one regga-tone band from Cuba. So the guy, the owner came there, the father of the owner of the band, the director of the band used to be my sound guy for the events in the city for 20 years. So he before he died, Dad of Kansas said, you know, take care of my son, you know. So I helped out his son. We regrouped the group here and cut out a bunch of records. And then just before COVID hit, we had a we had a situation where someone appropriated some of our music and we were going to we were taking them to court. We won. Anyway, so my friend who you know, and then we my friend won the case and and he won the you know, other awards, platinum, double platinum, gold album, you know, but I'm going to throw everything. He won all their awards. They gave them the awards, they gave them the rights of the music. So he's waiting for his payday now because they gave him all the rights that he rightfully owned. You know, so what happened was we started using the the original members from Cuba. We started recording songs here and there and coming out with and editing their videos in Cuba, which is, you know, a penny, a penny per dollar, you know. So we started doing all the production work over there and and then released the songs with him. And so I stopped performing because I was getting older. I didn't want to be jumping around like a monkey, you know, doing that kind of music. You know, I'm a Broadway guy. I'm not a regga tone guy. You know what I mean? But I was the MC. I was good at MC. So I was MC and get the crowd going Spanish and English and all that kind of stuff. So we were real crossover. But then we started recording with the original guys in Cuba and just getting more into that whole regga tone thing. And and then the guys, now they left Cuba's two of them left. And then the one, yeah, two of them left. And then they almost still here. It's through my buddy, you know what I mean? But I'm not cutting any albums or videos or anything anymore. You know, that that ship is sailed. What are you a commissioner of? I'm a commissioner of public affairs. So I run municipal court, veterans, seniors, cultural affairs, and the history department. So all the events that come out of the city, it's pretty much my you see lefty at the school. No, lefty, Cortina. No, he teaches at Washington. No, I never see him. Go to Washington. He's there. I've got to look for Washington 30. So 30 years, you know, that's Washington's going to Washington. Oh, wow. Oh, look at that. Look at that. It was really good. Oh, it's great seeing you, man. It's great being here. I'm sorry. No, that's it. That's it. That's it. It was great seeing you. It's great being here. You sure? Absolutely. No, no, I'm not saying they leave when you smack me somewhere. Great to meet you, Lucio. You have any questions for Lucio? I'm still getting over a lot of shit. Mainly the guy who jumped in front of cars for a living and then jumped in front of the wrong car. That's fucked up. We had a guy. What was the guy that we were robbing trains and he jumped off the train and he got caught in his arm and he lost an arm. Yeah. Yeah. And he used to be a cab driver in the city. So if you ever get in the cab with a one-armed dude, he's from North Bergen, though. You had no idea the stuff that we did. Just stop. You had no idea. When I first moved to North Bergen, it was scary. It was fucking scary. These guys went down and robbed trains every day. These guys were 12. 12. And they're robbing fucking trains. How do you think I got that motorcycle? The motorcycles would come in a box, not built. You throw the boxes off and then you had your brother come down and drive you later. You could fucking, then you had to pull the box out of the weeds. That's a thousand mosquito bites and then fucking, you know, that's how crazy. He reminded me of the swamps just now. That's crazy. The swamps was the best place to hang out. The only beating I got from my mom was because I took my bike where a bunch of our friends, and we rode down to the swamps, which is all the way, I mean, you're 10, 11 years old. That's a long way. Then we took it all the way up town, you know, to whatever, Western Avenue ends or whatever. Oh, yeah. And then it came back down. My bike kept on losing this chain because, and I made it at home like a 10 o'clock a night. My mom was living. I got the beating on my life. And my dad's, you're going to kill him. You're going to kill him. Dad was saying that. The one, I got one beating, man. I'll never forget it. I never forget it. Lucia was a real pleasure. I'm happy you came on. Same here, man. Give the, the Union City some love, because like I said, I'm from North Bergen, but man, I got a lot of my dad died in Union City. We had the bar for 20 years, you know, they never saw my dad that certificate. Once we talk about that, those motherfuckers, I never collected my insurance from Prudential. It's probably worth 10 million, man. Probably. But they wanted me to go back to Cuba and dig them up and scrap his bones. I'm not doing that shit. That motherfuckers nothing. He's dust now. For 10 million? It was a half million dollar policy in 1966. Dude, a fucking man. Let's go. I'll do whatever you need me to do. Well, you want to go to Cuba and try to dig up? Dig them up. People don't understand how Cuba is. People in this country don't understand how Cuba is living over there. When we left Cuba, we didn't leave only because of political reasons. There was nothing to eat. Times are tough. My mom comes from 16 brothers and sisters. Damn. What are you going to eat? So you're leaving because there's nothing to eat. You're leaving because you're oppressed. And they humiliate you on the way out because you have to go work in agriculture, you know, work camps and stuff like that. And we go to Spain, spend a year in Spain, suck and wind before you come here. Oh, man. People don't know the struggle. The struggle is real. The struggle is real. The struggle is not only real for Jewish people but also for Cuba. I had no idea. Love you too. I'm happy you got the time to come over and talk to me. It's good to see you. You're a big fucking thing in my childhood. I can't believe we're still here. You know, we all went through as kids and people fucking disappeared. But we're here slinging dick. Absolutely, man. Absolutely. You need a city forever, cocksuckers. Don't forget we're adding some shows. I got the 11th of December at the Stress Factory. And I added the 17th open mic at Uncle Vinny's on a Tuesday night just to keep working on material and doing stupid shit. Anything you want to talk about? Losing that said, man, you said enough to come with something like that. Next week, the 11th to the 14th, I'm with Josh Wolf and Tara Cairus, Kenneth Tracy, all over New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. There you go. If you live in Delaware, I know you got nothing to do. You know, Biden's dead and I don't feel so good myself. And you know, it's winter time. So go catch my brother Lisa. I love you, Lucio. Thank you for being here today. And we'll see you next week. That's it. Two weeks, three weeks till Christmas. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. And that's it. Take a hike. 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