A few things to highlight about this interview before you begin:
•Michael does not have a computer, so my interview with him was conducted on a speaker phone, using Voice Memos on my computer to record it.
•I didn’t understand that phone calls on my cell, if the phone was left on, would interrupt the Voice Memos on the computer, so a phone call midway did stop the recording of the interview, and I had to start it over again with a small gap in the middle. At the time, Michael was singing “Animal Fair” which you can find on YouTube.
•Subscribers should be aware that my goal in this interview, while consistent with my overall plan of creating a qusi-autobiography—a self-and-other inquiry through interviews—is not like my ones with Chuck Stein, Ellias Lonsdale, or John Friedlander, or later ones that I plan to do with family members. If the family minutiae don’t interest you, stop listening, or don’t start.
•Michael regarded this as a personal conversation between us that I happened to be recording, so context, when there, arises solely from within. I don’t remember all the names we invoked but among them were Paul Grossinger (PG), legal father to both of us but blood father to neither (though I thought he was my blood father between ages 9 and 30), Bunny Grossinger, maiden name Persky, Michael’s adoptive and legal mother and my stepmother, though blood relative to neither of us (far and away my best and most caring parent, but a major failure as a mother to Michael—she tried to see if she could return him when he didn’t meet her elitist standards); Elaine Etess, Paul Grossinger’s sister and our aunt); David “Doc” Etess, Elaine’s husband and an actual M.D. (someone whom Michael admired and whom Bunny and I found despicable); Mitchell Etess, Elaine’s oldest son and Michael’s and my cousin (he was killed in a helicopter crash in 1989 while returning from NYC to Atlantic City where he and two other executives were promoting a fight arranged by his boss Donald Trump (the bolts holding the rotor onto his helicopter were ostensibly loosened with Trump the target, but history took a different turn); James (“Jimmie”) Grossinger, Michael’s brother and my half-brother, biologically related to neither of us (he hasn’t spoken to me for almost thirty years, ostensibly because of my reporting truthfully my own experience of Paul Grossinger in the first edition of Out of Babylon, the only one published thus far); Jonathan (“Jonny”) Towers, my half brother in my natal NYC family with whom I shared a blood mother (he committed suicide in 2005 at age 57 by stabbing himself to death with a knife in a Connecticut boarding house); Deborah (Debby) Towers, my half sister in my natal NYC family with whom I shared a blood mother (she committed suicide in 2016 at age 64, jumping out an eleventh story window of the same apartment from which my mother jumped in 1975; Bernard “Bingo” Brandt, my blood father whom I never met (my mother’s relationship with him was a very brief affair in January-February 1944); Mitchell Etess (Mark’s younger brother who works at the Foxwood Resort and Casino in Connecticut); Billy Persky (Bunny’s younger brother); Martha Towers, maiden name Rothkrug, my mother (she died at age 55); Robert Towers, raised Reuben Turetzky, my stepfather; Milty Stackel (manager of the canteen at Grossinger’s), Ash Resnick (mafia enforcer), Lou Goldstein (director of activites at Grossingers), all among pre—modern-NBA basketball stars who played on the Grossinger’s basetball team; Irving Krall, the Hartford doctor who arranged Michael and James’ adoptions by Bunny and Paul; Lauren, Mark’s wife and the older sister of James’ wife Mindy; Benny, head baker at Grossinger’s; Henry, head kitchen steward at Grossinger’s; Abe Sharkey, director of day-time activities at Grossinger’s.
•Michael is having to fill an overly large role because all the members of my natal family are gone, including my younger siblings, James is not talking to me, and Bunny died recently (in 2021 at 97), so I just missed the chance to interview her. Their words, however, occupy close to 200 pages in forthcoming editions of Out of Babylon and New Moon, which I expect to have printed this calendar year (2025). This includes dialogues with Bunny, Martha, Bob, Jonny, and Debby, and letters from my half-brother and half-sister. The story of Grossinger’s is also told in detail in both editions of Out of Babylon, and to a certain degree in New Moon, and you can also find other versions of it as well as photographs and photographs of its ruins online.
•Michael has an idiosyncratic way of telling a story; that’s one reason that I am giving you a cast of characters. I tried to meet him where he is and where we were as kids—goofballs we called each other—rather than trying to force him to reminisce objectively.
•I mean it in the best sense when I say that Michael is working class. He has working class genes (if that’s a possibility), a working class ideology, and a working class destiny that informs his perspective on life. Interviewing him is not that different from interviewing a docker or trucker. But he is also a painter with an MFA who did art therapy in prisons. We didn’t get to that in the interview, but we may try again in a few months.
Lindy Hough and Michael Grossinger, Montpelier, Vermont, June 2022
