A Whole Bag of Crazy: Sordid Tales of Hookers, Weed, and Grindhouse Movies

by Pete Chiarella, Mike Watt (Editor)

“I am known as 42nd Street Pete, a character that I created as a living reminder of that lost decade, the ‘70s. I was one of a million nameless, faceless kids with no direction and no future. We all had the ugly specter of the Vietnam War hanging like a sword
over our heads. We weren’t college material; we were clerks, gas station attendants, custodians, the like. Pretty much cannon fodder for the front lines. Most of us knew that we stood a good chance of being drafted and coming back in a bag, so we lost ourselves in the explosion of drugs, alcohol, sex, violence, and music that were the ‘70s.”

Hustler, pot fiend, porn expert.Take a walk down a dark alley with 42nd Street Pete as he recounts his tales growing up on "The Deuce". Criminal activity, classic undesirable cinema, pot, booze, pros, cons. The '70 uncut, uncensored.

If you really remember the ’70s, you were lucky to have survived them.

Genres: Film

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 16, 2018

Reviews

[John Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pete is a pretty good storyteller and gets into the 42nd st. grindhouse movies and porn places of the 70s. Interspersed are some movie reviews of various exploitation films. He covers his personal life and the crazy characters he knew who he did business with; also the denizens of Times Square. For years he sold videos and any other merchandise he could get his hands on (some of it hot) in New Jersey flea markets and he gives us the skinny on that. In the final pages he writes about the horror convention he founded and ran for about a decade. Throughout are lots of drunken, wild, nutty and sometimes violent adventures.

I'd probably give this 4 stars if it didn't have 2 problems: First, there were many, many typos and sentences that were incomplete or repeated, and didn't connect with the text that followed. Second, in a few of his stories about his shady business dealings he gets too detailed and makes them tedious and hard to understand. I still had fun reading it though. 42nd Street Pete is quite a film historian in the 70s exploitation genre and I found several movies he included in this book that I am planning on seeing.

[Dan Bowers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

If you're a fan of sleaze, this is the book for you! Once I started reading it, it was hard to put down until I reached the end. 42nd Street Pete has penned an amazing homage to a bygone era, the likes of which we will never see again. His stories of the goings on in NYC and across the river in NJ are fascinating. If you are a fan of exploitation/grindhouse films and the culture around them, this is a must read!

[Lord Booktopus von Cephaloid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun memoir with some sordid tales indeed, though some of it gets a little repetitive and there's a bit too much non-42nd Street related material. A good resource for those who want to reminisce about NYC's golden age of sleaze, or (like me) never got to experience it.

[Aji Uo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less a book about the Grindhouse Theatres of 42nd st, and more just a general memoir of Pete's life. Its entertaining, and the brief moments he talks of movies are quite wonderful.

But sadly those moments are brief, and their is tons of problematic content otherwise.

[Jacob Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Jacob Kelly book through and through.

[Andre Irgendwer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fans des Prä-Giuliani New Yorks werden eine Zeit lang ganz gut unterhalten. Aber irgendwann kommt dann doch durch, dass man hier die Biographie eines eigentlich stinknormalen Menschen liest, der seine jugendlichen Sauf- und Drogenerlebnisse als eine Art authentische Gossenromantik ala Bukowski verkaufen will. Nur leider ist er halt nicht Bukowski, sondern halt nur irgend so ein Typ, der in einer von ihm selbst geschaffenen Nische als toller Hecht angesehen werden will. Dann fällt es in sich zusammen.