Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (11 page)

The peeps had glass partitions dividing the Live Nude Girls from the voyeurs, whose hot breath smeared across the windows like that of rabid paupers at a toy store window. The girls reciprocated by smudging their flanks against the cloudy divider. In mid-1978, these glass partitions shrewdly began to disappear, one by one, as vice-squad policies seemed to relax with Mayor Beame’s retirement. Stores hung
OPEN WINDOW
signs over the newly christened booths, which offered an “even closer view” of Live Nude Girls. Naturally, the course of human nature drew these two opposite species together—the cages were finally opened. The girls began to offer quick feels for a dollar, and as customers grew more demanding, tit-sucking and cunt-lapping soon became routine. Within months, all peep stall windows throughout the Square were removed. The crowds were as never before. Bathrooms opened at the Pussycat and Adulterama where customers gargled afterward.

Show World’s peeps had metal risers that were like guillotines—previously, girls could lift up the shade. Girls commonly got caught halfway through the windows. “Guy’d give ‘em ten dollars for a blowjob,” remembers chief engineer Roger K., who rescued dozens. “They’d go through the booth, hang there, the shade would come down, they would get pinched. You couldn’t reverse the type of mechanism we were using, it had to go all the way down before it went up.”

A peep show patron could summon a naked, willing stranger to his window with the wave of a dirty dollar bill. He could request tit, twat, hind end, have a leg hoisted into his booth, a boot in his face. Starving octopus hands grabbed over girls’ bodies, trying to wangle a finger into paydirt. In this peculiar mating dance, ghetto girls paraded booth to booth, fondling their wares and twitching their fingers in a
pay up
gesture. Dollars were stuffed into shoulder purses and stockings. Some couldn’t quite decide whether they belonged in this racket, standing back haughtily while a customer craned his horny neck out the window, lips grasping for a nip. More enthusiastic girls, often black and Hispanic, propped a wide-spread ass over the window ledge to be sucked heartily. A grizzled old Festus might pay ten dollars for a soul kiss, while a younger guy might have his hair petted romantically as he sucked a boob.

In their workaday world the girls faced a wall of windows which opened and closed on a humorless gallery of zombie faces. “All you see is a hand, you don’t see a face,” remembers Candy Staton, an Amazonian Peep Queen whose bod made her $150 a night during the open-window days. “I started as one of the girls who’d rather wear panties and keep the guys above my waist. I didn’t want just anyone to touch me down there. But after I saw how much money you could make, I did it. It drove me crazy, I couldn’t handle it. But I did it.”

Candy “graduated from Syracuse with a major in physical therapy.” She had an ugly-duckling childhood, then turned stunning at eighteen. She felt a calling to parade herself in Times Square by night, but worked as a children’s therapist by day. For one year at Blackjack, the most squalid of peeps, where junkies grapple desperately for tips, she ground her pussy into the middle fingers of anonymous menfolk with more passion than any other Live Nude Girl on 42nd Street. “Everybody was in one untidy dressing room, all the girls, the janitors, constant traffic streaming through, pimps hitting on you—you didn’t know who was who. I knew two junkies who died, both young women with children. The management was nasty to the customers. But the money was there, and I met some good people who I stay in touch with.”

The live peeps were the straight man’s closest equivalent to the underside of gay nightlife—wandering into a dark booth to mouth the slimy genitals of strange women, whose breasts were coated with the slobber of fifty previous tit-biters and whose sucked-out cunts glistened at premium rates. Underage black youths snuck in, having a high old time making the girls cringe with embarrassment (“I see yo’ titty, ha, ha!”). Eugene, a twenty-two-year-old employee at Barking Fish, the Cajun fast-food joint across from Show World, recalls his bemusement when he began waiting on peep girls: “I recognized about six of them from high school in Queens, I even went to junior high with some—Jamaica High, Andrew Jackson. They try to stay away from me, they don’t want people to know what they doin’. Girls from Queens, they all act the same. Real quiet, but when they come into the city, they become nymphs. Girls from The Bronx or Manhattan would think twice about working a peep show, but a girl from Queens thinks nobody from out there will see her. A lot are also from the South, you can tell by their accents.”

In January 1980, Show World chief Richard Basciano ordered windows reinstalled in all locations. “We closed windows in the Peep-Alive ‘cause we felt it was getting carried away,” says Roger. “Girls were makin’ all kinds of deals with the customers—in fact, we were threatened that we’d be shut down for prostitution. We made a lot of money, but he chose to shut the windows. Now, we got hurt, we really took a beating in profits, our business almost went down the tubes, we shut down Peep-Alives at two locations.”

The cops keep a steady pressure on Show World, whose personnel take it in stride. There are periodic roundups of girls, inspections for electrical codes and health department violations. Even Candy Samples was carted off in handcuffs after her grandmotherly striptease on the Triple Treat stage. “But what upsets my boss,” says Roger, “is how these other stores can still have their windows open. We took busts and harassment for prostitution left and right.”

Blackjack, one of two Times Square peeps to defiantly continue the open-window tradition, toned down the contact with its harlots to no more than breasts. A scrawled ultimatum by the runway lays the final responsibility on Live Nude Girls:
No finger in crack of ass. If caught, you will be fired
.

. . .
In the darkness of his booth, Dudley Arnholt senses a disturbance. On the brink of climax, he glances down from Foxy Bertha to see what looks like a tiny Martian spacecraft hovering at the bottom of his booth. But then his eyes adjust on a hand-held camera, which suddenly clicks off a round of flashes. Some fag pervert is snapping pictures of Arnholt’s balls from under the divider! He zips up, eyes blinded, and kicks at the outrage rather effeminately. His worst fear has been realized. Was it some blackmail attempt? He storms out of the booth stuttering, but quickly pulls himself in check. Back among the horny assemblage, everything normal, nothing out of the ordinary going on. Arnholt makes it to the cashier, whose fingers are dishing out grubby coins in spurts of four. The masturbators make easy targets for shortchanging.

“How many?” the barker demands, oblivious to Arnholt the Man. His bare arms are cut like stone; Arnholts are like macaroni. Arnholt steps up his courage, about to utter the first words he has ever spoken in a Times Square sex joint. His outrage comes out weak-voiced, but he gets across the urgent matter. “Get’cha kwaters here, live women on stage!” answers the barker. Arnholt feels like a rape victim, but he can’t identify exactly which booth it was. The cashier is finally distracted by Arnholt’s charge, and points to a sign that states, sure enough, that picture-taking within the premises is forbidden and dangerous to your health. If they catch the culprit, “we’ll fuck him up,” says the cashier. But whoever did it has disappeared into the wild blue yonder.

A cold sweat forms over Arnholt’s forehead as he trudges helplessly toward the exit. Somebody, somewhere, has photos of Arnholt smacking his beef. He is afraid if he comes back he’ll find his cock being marketed on a deck of cards. Worse yet, what if he pops a quarter in a film peep and sees his own celluloid image masturbating back at him? He starts to dream about returning with a tube of Krazy Glue to gum up all the quarter slots.

In Search of the Longest Stiletto

The Paradise Bootery opened at 1586 Broadway in 1925. Twenty years later, the store was acquired by Harry Weller, a double-chinned, rotund sultan of slut pumps whose supply of high heels came from a Hungarian named Alex Kaufman. An old-world shoe artisan, Kaufman acquired the store himself in the mid-1970s. Kaufman has outsmarted the trendy commercial shoe industry—he lines the walls and ceilings of his little shop with pumps, button-downs, slut platforms, and raw materials that he will soon mold around the finely turned ankles of Broadway’s slickest chicks and highfalutin broads. Though he says he owns nine shoe stores, Kaufman can be found every evening at the Paradise. Almost every hooker in Times Square shops here, every peep show girl and topless dancer who saves her tips, and certainly any stripper worth her salt. The Radio City Rockettes from around the block drop by; stars of Broadway stage and screen have been customers for fifty-eight years. But business will never equal the days before the Latin Quarter closed, in the late sixties, when the Paradise stayed open twenty-four hours.

“Fox Studios just ordered two hundred pairs of high platform forties shoes,” says Kaufman, stapling shoe boxes together after hours. “We can either duplicate them or pull them out of stock.” The secret behind this Times Square establishment is that Kaufman has been holding sixty thousand pairs of shoes in stock for years—thousands of new unsold shoes from each decade. When they come back in fashion, like forties platforms, he pulls the originals out. “Workers who made these shoes are dead; they don’t make these anymore.”

Kaufman also makes periodic trips to Bloomingdale’s, then duplicates designer brands “with even better materials.” The same pair of Charles Jourdan pumps, which cost $175 at Bloomie’s, are $40 in the Kaufman label. “Alligator shoes that sell for $700, I sell for $150.” They duplicate famous designers on premises, at 40 percent off designer cost, sans the bullshit. Kaufman remembers Liz Taylor going for one of his sandal styles: “She bought twelve pairs in each color, and we make about ten colors.”

Kaufman makes shoes from customers’ scrawled illustrations, pulling out orders from Tokyo, Paris, and the Midwest. He used to make them by hand until he grew too old, and now employs assistants to keep up with mail orders.

Gonzales, a college kid on the Paradise night shift, admits he is in a dream position, servicing the whims of hot dames who strut through the shop. “It’s a museum here, they make a fuss over the stock. If Kaufman doesn’t stop me, it’s great, you meet the kind of hookers who pick
you
up!”

“I had one girl from Atlanta yesterday,” says Kaufman. “She was beautiful, and she lifts up her skirt, asks me to take measurements. I was embarrassed. They come in here braless, their shirts open.”

At night the store is empty, and Kaufman and his Hispanic assistant are resigned to stapling shoe boxes. “You wanna do it the way you did in 1920?” whines Gonzales over his boss’ instructions. “I do it 1983. With all due respect.” But Kaufman, more than fifty years his senior, has the kid beaten with more finished shoe boxes.

“I have customers who steal two right shoes, they come and ask for money back,” says Kaufman, relating the most common scam in the shoe game. The walls are lined with thousands of right shoes, and only rights, so thieves can’t make off with pairs. “But every day we have at least five single shoes stolen.”

City planners have been coming in frequently to measure the basement for a projected Broadway mall. But Alex Kaufman’s most vexing problem at the moment is where to find a six-inch stiletto heel. The shoes, ordered by a local hooker, are otherwise finished. “The leg looks much better in a high heel. Very big difference between low heel. But for this heel, I look all over the world. They want higher all the time so they can be spotted more. But this high a heel I will never find.

“We also have a lot of homosexuals looking for women’s sizes,” says Mr. Kaufman, with a sly twinkle. “Nice men, executives, go in corner and try on shoes. More now than years ago. They say they’re here for their wife, she wears the same size....”

FOR
THE
RECORD!

Queen of the Gang-Bang

They called it the “Spermathon,” and by evening’s end the score of media reps and toweled studs were euphorically certain they’d witnessed a true-blue episode of sexual history. Not a drop of blood was shed as Tara Alexandar, the heroine of the night, successfully balled, sucked, and jerked off eighty-two strange men and her husband for a gang-bang total of eighty-three. This was not a gang
rape
, mind you, as the event was fully sponsored at Plato’s Retreat by
Midnight Blue/Screw
, with all involved having avidly volunteered. Especially voluptuous young Tara, whose adolescent dreams of taking on football teams and army platoons reached some sort of fruition.

In her dressing room an hour prior to scum time, Tara was applying little dabs of makeup and brushing her brunette waves like any honest secretary on a coffee break. She was concerned about her hair holding up, things of that nature. In fact, this twenty-four-year-old lass, who went to Washington Irving High in Manhattan, was so cheerfully confident and appeared in such good mental health that all our psycho-hooker preconceptions were quickly dispelled. Her face, with just a trace of mileage closing in, still took on a lovely expression as she tilted her head in the dim light. Her perfectly upturned nose may or may not have been the work of a plastic surgeon. Slipping out of her street clothes, Tara proved to be bustier and more curvaceous than her photos, with smooth white flesh that would soon be ravaged by an onslaught of sexual volunteers. How did she feel?

“I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I hope all the guys have. I haven’t been training, but I’ve abstained from sex for four days to stay horny. For me that’s a lot. Got plenty of rest.... I suppose I do have exhibitionistic tendencies.”

If she was looking for man trouble, the poor girl may have gotten in over her head. Over 1,200 responses arrived after Tara’s declaration to produce at least 75 male orgasms was announced in the press. Invitations to 750 were henceforth sent out. Tara was expecting “200 to 300 fellows” to show, but it had been raining all day. And there was no telling who she’d have to face, be they scuzzoids from the Orange Julius sector, nose-bleeding derelicts, or Iranians with Islamic BO. It seemed an almost nightmarish sexual feat to attempt.