Now he’s just smashing noses.
Two months after pleading guilty to a late night, drunken, window-smashing rampage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, James Whittemore was back in Manhattan Criminal Court today for allegedly socking a fellow straphanger in the nose on a Harlem A-train platform.
“I lost it,” the diminutive 23-year-old admitted to The Post of throwing the first punch at an apparently deranged homeless man who’d gotten “in my face.”
“It’s the Irish in me.”
The would-be NYC actor had won his 15-minutes of fame — and a mention on David Letterman’s Top 10 list — two summers ago, after he was found passed out drunk on the broken-glass-covered and urine-soaked carpeting of the lobby of the theater, home to the “Late Show.”
“He wouldn’t leave us alone,” Whittemore, who’d been with his girlfriend Kelly at the time, said of his alleged victim, who is named as George Harris in the criminal complaint charging misdemeanor assault, criminal mischief and harassment.
Whittemore said he’d moved to Chicopee, Mass., since his notorious Stupid Human Trick, changing professions and becoming a DJ. This week, rather than steer clear of here entirely, he made the mistake of visiting pals in Harlem en route to La Guardia airport for a trip to Hawaii, he said.
“I cannot stand this place!” he said, exasperatedly, of New York City. Still, if the city’s straphangers can be confrontational, his fellow prisoners in Central Booking were downright affable, he said.
“They’re like, ‘What did the little crazy white guy do?” he recalled of the attempted murderers and turnstile jumpers he met overnight. “They’re like, ‘He’s Michael J. Fox!”
Whittemore must return to court Nov. 28.