Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (10 page)

“We were complicating simplicity. I learned this from my boss. Guys were geared to the quarter, they walk in and drop it in either A or B side, it would come on. I used to stand downstairs and watch, customers couldn’t understand how it worked. I fought with everybody here, insisted video loops could make money. So I worked with an engineer night and day for eighteen weeks to develop the A and B video system in 1983. Eighteen weeks of hell.”

Roger enters a video base room, the fruits of his labors. Forty-two VCRs are in operation twenty-four hours, playing features now, though they only run when a token triggers their tape. A
Please Stand By
message appears during rewind, with scenes from Side B—the customer’s token freezes till Side A returns. “I have people trying to send me airline tickets to fly out and help ‘em develop systems.” Roger compares notes with peep show engineers from all over the country twice a year at the X-rated industry’s consumer electronics show, held in Vegas and Chicago.

“Fuckin’ heat,” laments the main-floor manager, over poor peep show attendance during a heat wave. “Nobody can get it up in this weather.” All cash boxes from booths are emptied at the end of the week, with amounts varying drastically—this week’s haul sucks. A box might contain anywhere from zero to a hundred and fifty tokens, which registers on meters. “When I get the sheets at the end of the week,” says Roger, “I average all the machines. If one is below fifty plays, we pull it. If a loop does great, we’ll put another copy on the floor. A feature like
Behind the Green Door
will play forever.”

Fresh porn shipments come in weekly, with video making film loops obsolete. Roger monitors all machines at more than a half-dozen locations; he wants to program a computer to take in all the meter readings from more than three hundred peep show booths in the empire, by direct feed into a microprocessor terminal. He will gauge weather conditions and seasons into his computer printout, which he’ll check without leaving his office.

“I studied electronics at a vocational school. If you went to college, you were a good kid at that time, whereas if you went to Votech, you were a troublemaker. But when I got out, people started to realize that anybody who went there was gonna be somebody. It’s satisfying to know you’re pioneering a field. When I started here ten years ago, everyone was working under the gun, you never knew if you were gonna get locked up—though I was only an electrician.” Roger has friends at NBC who try to lure him out of the smut biz to work in their corporate world, but he was miserable when he tried another job for several months. Show World’s boss, Richard Basciano, he says, gave him room to stretch out electronically, to innovate every incarnation of the peeps, setting Times Square’s standard. What other company, he asks, would encourage such freedom, even after large, costly mistakes were made? His parents now acknowledge that Show World’s action keeps their son happiest. Roger plans to incorporate video discs in the future for all peeps, eliminating the wear and tear of current equipment, and he is experimenting with holographic porn.

“I worked as a laborer/electrician when they began building Show World in 1974. This was a hardware store and a Chemical Bank. We did everything the opposite of what anybody would have done in the business. Guys thought we were crazy, nuts.” The complex was built behind closed doors for about $400,000, with eighteen months of construction. The store opened with twenty-four telephone-booth film peeps and a dozen live-peep booths, nothing special. But two years later, a newfangled McDonald’s-like porn center began replacing the sawdust floor “scumatoriums” of Times Square; Show World broke in their slick design at the Pussycat in 1977. Supermarket aisles, everything steel, Formica, tile floors for simple swabbing, no more linoleum that became rotted with discharge. That old-time 42nd Street squalor, thought to be a crucial environment for the self-degradation of customers, waned; Show World’s stores
upgraded
the neighborhood from the “Hell’s Bedroom” nightmare parlors they replaced, in the view of many.

“I tell ya the truth—I don’t go into any of those other places in Times Square,” says Roger. “I’m afraid to, I have no reason to. If they know who I am, they may take offense—what am I lookin’ for? I hear about drugs, who’s gettin’ their heads broke, who’s havin’ a shoot-out. You gotta be on guard even walking past those places. A lotta these guys are on ninety-nine-year leases, they’re not payin’ the high rent a new tenant would. They’re more of a nuisance than competition, they’re giving us a bad name. We’ve spent a lot of time and money to run an up-and-up joint, a clean-cut place, well lit, so you don’t worry about losing your wallet or your life. The smaller operations don’t care if they’re gone tomorrow, they’re in for the fast buck, I would say. They’ll be condemned. We feel we’re runnin’ a cleaner business.”

Peep History

Pornography was as dirty as its name when it first came to Times Square, reared by bad guys from other rackets. According to journalist William Sherman, the notorious Martin Hodas made his fortune introducing the first Times Square peep shows. Hodas managed a vending machine route in Brooklyn till 1966. “One day,” he claimed, “I was talking to this repair guy over on Tenth Avenue near 42nd, and the guy says, I bet you could do something with these old film machines.’ They were like nickelodeons. So you could say, the modern peep show was born by accident.”

At the end of 1966, he bought thirteen of the old machines, offering fifty-fifty splits to the several existing risqué bookshops, whose most extreme material were under-the-counter nudist volumes, girlie playing cards (French Decks), and Times Square standards like urinating rubber statues and colored photos of nudes. Hodas threaded the machines with California stag films of dancing broads flashing tit and cunt, images never exhibited publicly. Store owners said no, fearing the law—but after a few weeks the owner of 259 West 42nd (still in business, featuring books, peeps, and knives) went for the sales pitch, placing the first machines. To everyone’s surprise, the quarters wouldn’t quit—the other stores wanted some, so Hodas custom-ordered machines from Kentucky, placing them at 113 and 210 West 42nd (Blackjack), and 1498 Broadway. Customers who flocked to the stores in 1967 allegedly asked for more explicit mags and loops. The neighborhood saw rapid conversions to porn, which replaced small merchants around Times Square. Major realtors who owned property cashed in on the phenom, as Hodas and other newly christened smut peddlers bought up leases, paying up to five grand for six hundred square feet. West Coast distributors took the lead in churning out films, while Hodas opted to shoot his own grainy, pimple-assed loops, such as “Flesh Party” and “Elevator Orgy.” Gradually the G-strings disappeared and out danced loops like “Sucky Fucky.” In 1970, the Mine-Cine, in the Wurlitzer Building on 42nd, presented Times Square’s first live cock-in-cunt routine before spectators, in the guise of “studio tours” of fuck loops being filmed in progress.

The mob made their thrust into Times Square porn shops in 1968. They opened their own joints and muscled in on others, maintaining a legendary grip on the area’s vices, which stemmed back to bootlegging and gambling in the Roaring Twenties. Here was a semilegal “gray area,” a flowering industry where owners couldn’t exactly run to the cops when they were leaned on. In March 1968, Hodas was competing with John “Sonny” Franceze, a family boss who’d backed a rash of peeps. Hodas paid $150,000 in mob protection from 1968 to 1971, but the returns were large—other cities opened up for him, strong-arm assistance was provided. By the end of 1968 he either owned or leased peeps in more than thirty Manhattan locations.

Hodas’ main man was a powerfully built ex-airplane mechanic who twice a week wheeled a large steamer trunk from store to store to collect the quarters. He also lugged a balance scale that he dumped each location’s spoils onto until they evened out for the half-and-half split. Once it was full, Hodas and his collector wheeled the trunk to one of four Times Square banks where Hodas kept accounts. The Chemical Bank at Eighth and 42nd (where Show World now stands) counted $15,000 in quarters one afternoon from Hodas. During the first two months of 1969, eighty-five percent of the quarters shipped to Chemical’s main branch, according to a vice-prez, were brought in from Hodas’ peeps.

By 1970, four hundred film peep machines were scattered about New York City, according to Senator Everett Dirksen’s alarming anti-smut exposé in the
Reader’s Digest
. The Organized Crime Control Bureau estimated more than a thousand by 1972. They were in dark backrooms of porn bookstores, which reeked of urine and old orgasms, shown by nickelodeon or projected in curtained-off booths. Viewing time in the good old days was two minutes for a quarter; inflation would drop this to thirty seconds in just a dozen years.

Martin Hodas, by 1970, owned two Lincoln Continentals, a swimming pool, and a forty-foot cabin cruiser, and raised a large family on Long Island. He commuted to his office, East Coast Cinematics at 113 West 42nd, listed in the phone book, unlike other porn store bosses who still ran business from backrooms of Little Italy social clubs at that time. According to a police raid of Hodas’ office in January 1972, the Poppa of the Peeps was taking in twenty grand a week. He served a year in the slam for income-tax evasion, then returned to the Square, where his stores began to pale next to the newer ones.

Peeps became the meat-and-potatoes attraction, as common to Times Square as slot machines are to Las Vegas. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Times Square is the boundless variety of sexual nightmares and sweet dreams depicted in thousands of ten-minute loops. Loops were the tough, heartless training ground for the first generation of porn stars, a fifteen-year phenomenon made obsolete by video. This was pornography’s strongest medium, in which one could pick his favorite female creature, crystallized into a perfect 8mm, ten-minute rhapsody, and pop one’s cookies. After a preview in the booth, a washed-out color reel could be obtained up front for $18.

Some of the first, true to cliché, were ground out by hardened criminals in grungy basements on 42nd Street, with syphilitic junkies fucking for a $50 fix. Before professionals entered the field, any moron could pose behind camera as a director, for his personal perversions. Bobby Surretsky, a short, fat con man of many crimes and aliases, pushed gay hardcore into his newly acquired Midtown Books in 1967, at 138 West 42nd. He filmed his own primitive loops across the street, much of it S&M and kiddie porn. By 1969, he was moving 2,500 reels for ten grand each week. The pimp who supplied little boys for his films turned him in to the FBI, who discovered Surretsky had recently cashed $400,000 in bogus police paychecks. Surretsky turned informer, served two years in jail on a murder conspiracy, and was last reported to be in the coin business.

There were good pornographers and bad pornographers, same as in any field. Toby Ross, one of the early pros who was beloved by some of his actors, Was the only black director in porn. Having made hundreds of flicks by the mid-1970s, he stated his own strategy of directing to Marc Stevens: “You can be used... but not misused.”

The earliest loops—the first pornos produced by organized companies with ongoing series—went by the brand names of Kiss, Pretty Girl, Color Climax, and Lasse Braun (from Europe). Stars of Sex presented Tina Russell, a reigning loop queen of the early seventies, while the Collection series introduced Candy Samples. Young John Holmes, out of rural Ohio in the early 1970s, looked like a monkey, with a lantern jaw and greasy crewcut—he began his career in endless loops for Playmate, Kama Sutra, and Limited Edition. The Diamond Collection was the raunchiest of the straight loops, each ending with an ugly female specimen blubbering under a harsh facial come shot. Club International (not the mag) tapped even more misogynous territory, like “Maternity Ward Sex,” featuring lovely Susaye London in her ninth month of pregnancy, taking on the obstetrician and black hospital attendant. Joys of Erotica presented stripper Veri Knotty with a four-foot co-star in “Anal Dwarf.” But even the less frequent S&M material, or obscure rape loop, acted out its psychodrama bloodlessly, or with little authority.

Most standard loops portrayed suck and fuck. America’s favorite “fourteen-inch” son, John Holmes, starred in 150 Swedish Erotica loops alone, ubiquitous in the Square, while Vanessa Del Rio popped up in every other booth, with Seka gaining.

Any public traces of highly illegal kiddie porn disappeared for good by the mid-1970s from Times Square. But the kook loops remained in the rear ends of several scumatoriums. A dive called Exotic Circus, at 140 West 42nd, contained familiar Swedish Erotica loops up front, but those with the courage to walk to the back found loops of menstruation-vampires, bowel movements unloading, girls fucking horses, Great Danes getting their peckers sucked. The slicker Peepland, former locale of Hubert’s Museum, opened in January 1978, its downstairs sanctum harboring a hundred blue assembly-line booths. Here were strange and unnatural acts from German distributors, a Disneyland in hell, as quoted from show-cards: “Two wild girls shove live eels up snatch and asshole!”; “Fish-fucking!”; “Farmboy fucks cow”; “Man fucks a hen”; “Woman sticks arm up cow’s ass!”; “Man licks 400-lb. pig’s asshole!”; “Girl takes on dog, horse, and pig simultaneously.” Though these were supposedly novelty loops, a browsing patron might just have easily spotted a wad plopped across the screen of “Two Nuns and a Donkey” as he would in a John Holmes loop, romantic by comparison. “Mice Torture” depicted two men pumping live mice through a tube that was inserted up a bound woman’s vage—before the viewer could get hot over the mice, the two guys started blowing each other. In retrospect, none of these poor animals ever fucked their way to the top, becoming the first Lassie, Flipper, or Mighty Mouse of porn.

Times Square’s “Live Nude Girls” surfaced at 109 West 42nd in 1972. Customers gazed through a mail slot, and the girls raced into bikinis during police raids. Around the corner at the Paradise on Sixth Avenue, one flight over the 11-11 bookstore, attractive models rotated on a platform, spreading their legs so wide, gents in the curtained stalls could almost see China. This, at a time when mere pubic hair had hardly surfaced on news-stands. Both peeps smelled like subway urinals and were short-lived.