(cover illustration by Bruce Carleton)
This is All Roads Lead to Great Neck, where you’ll witness stoned student freakouts during high school productions of The Diary of Anne Frank, toke from sacred hash pipes, and annoy local cheese-shop proprietors. Navigate the generation gap and the confounding neuroses of high school faculty and administrators who secretly lust after aging beauty queens, marvel at miraculous sturgeon that scream Yiddish curses, and travel through space, time, and Olde New York in a fantastical tricked-out buggy piloted by the angel of sacred prostitution.
Get high among teen Vietnam War protesters and hangers-on at Grace Avenue Park; wait on line at Irving’s Delicatessen with boxer Floyd Patterson, then join him on the therapist’s couch while the former world champ struggles with post-retirement feelings of inadequacy. Head into the city to catch Leslie West and Mountain at the Fillmore East, with kasha varnishkes and Cel-Rays at Ratner’s after, echoing forgotten spectacles and entertainments of times long past.
All Roads Lead to Great Neck leads you on a hazy tour through the brief, intoxicated life of Bruce Disoto, doomed adolescent hippie trying to survive young adulthood, prone to visions of a 19th century Jewish pimp while tripping.
A literary culmination of the author’s lifelong fascinations, All Roads Lead to Great Neck is an exploration of Jews and Jewish identity, racial and societal confusion, the mysteries of sex and the extremes some will go to for it, and forgotten characters and lost history of New York.
All Roads Lead to Great Neck is primo Friedman—bizarre, nostalgic, unique, tragic…and very, very funny.
Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin…
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